TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL. 


BY 

W.  L. 

Author  of  ".4  Lost  Soul,"  ''''Adventures  of  Jimmy  Brown, 
"  Trying  to  Find  Europe,"  etc.,  etc. 


ILLUSTRATED  BY 
RICHARD   JACK  AND   HAL   HURST. 


MERCANTILE  LIBRARY, 

NEW  YORK. 

M319389 

NEW  YORK 
J.   SELWIN   TAIT   &    SONS 


COPYRIGHT,  1893,  BY 
J.  SELWIN  TAIT  &  SONS 


CONTENTS. 


AN  ORNITHOLOGICAL  ROMANCE,     ....          i 

JEWSEPPY, 12 

THAT  LITTLE  FRENCHMAN,     ....  26 

THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE,  ....  38 

A  UNION  MEETING, 52 

A  CLERICAL  ROMANCE, 63 

A  MYSTERY, 80 

MY  BROTHER  ELIJAH 93 

THE  ST.  BERNARD  MYTH, 108 

A  MATRIMONIAL  ROMANCE,       ...  .  124 

HOSKINS'  PETS, 139 

THE  CAT'S  REVENGE,  153 

SILVER-PLATED,      .        .  168 


2043240 


MERCANTILE  LCBRARY, 

MEW  YORK. 


TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL 


AN  ORNITHOLOGICAL  ROMANCE. 

FOUR  Americans  were  sitting  in  the  smoking- 
room  of  a  Paris  hotel.  One  of  them  was  a  griz- 
zled, middle-aged  man,  who  sat  silent  and  apart 
from  the  others  and  consumed  his  heavy  black 
cigar  with  a  somewhat  gloomy  air.  The  other 
three  were  briskly  talking.  They  had  been 
three  days  in  Paris,  and  had  visited  the  Moulin 
Rouge,  the  tomb  of  Napoleon,  and  the  sewers, 
and  naturally  felt  that  they  were  thoroughly 
acquainted  with  the  French  capital,  the  French 
government,  and  the  French  people.  They 
were  unanimously  of  the  opinion  that  Paris  was 
in  all  things  fifty  years  behind  the  age,  and  at 

least  sixty  behind  Chicago.     There  was  nothing 
1  1 


2  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

fit  to  eat,  drink,  or  smoke  in  Paris.  The  French 
railway  carriages  were  wretched  and  afforded 
no  facilities  for  burning  travellers  in  case  of 
an  accident.  The  morals  of  French  society — 
as  studied  at  the  Moulin  Rouge — were  utterly 
corrupt,  owing  possibly  to  that  absence  of  free 
trade  in  wives  and  husbands  which  a  liberal 
system  of  divorce  permits.  The  French  people 
did  not  understand  English,  which  was  alone 
sufficient  to  prove  them  unfit  for  self-govern- 
ment, and  their  preference  for  heavy  five-franc 
pieces  when  they  might  have  adopted  soft  and 
greasy  dollar  bills  showed  their  incurable  lack 
of  cleanliness. 

Suddenly  the  silent  man  touched  the  bell  and 
summoned  a  waiter. 

"  Waiter,"  he  said,  as  that  functionary  en- 
tered the  room,  "  bring  me  an  owl." 

"If  you  please,  sir?"  suggested  the  waiter, 
timidly. 

"  I  said,  bring  me  an  owl !  If  you  pretend  to 
talk  English  you  ought  to  understand  that." 

"Yes,  sir.  Certainly,  sir.  How  would  you 
please  to  have  the  nowl?" 


AN  ORNITHOLOGICAL  ROMANCE.  3 

"Never  you  mind.  You  go  and  bring  me  an 
owl,  and  don't  be  too  long  about  it." 

The  waiter  was  gone  some  little  time,  and, 
then  returning,  said,  "  I  am  very  sorry,  sir,  but 
we  cannot  give  you  a  nowl  to-night.  The  bar- 
keeper is  out  of  one  of  the  materials  for  making 
nowls.  But  I  can  bring  you  a  very  nice  cock- 
tail." 

"Never  mind,"  replied  the  American. 
"  That'll  do.  You  can  go  now." 

"I  beg  your  pardon,   sir,"  said  one  of  the 

* 

three  anatomizers  of  the  French  people,  speak- 
ing with  that  air  of  addressing  a  vast  popular 
assemblage  which  is  so  characteristic  of  digni- 
fied American  conversationalists.  "  Would  you 
do  me  the  favor  to  tell  me  and  these  gentlemen 
why  you  ordered  an  owl?" 

"I  don't  mind  telling  you,"  was  the  answer, 
"  but  I  can't  very  well  do  it  without  telling  you 
a  story  first." 

"  All  right,  Colonel.  Give  us  the  story,  by  all 
means." 

The  elderly  American  leaned  back  in  his 
chair  searching  for  inspiration  with  his  gaze 


4  TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL. 

fixed  on  the  chandelier.  He  rolled  his  cigar 
lightly  from  one  corner  of  his  mouth  to  the 
other  and  back  again,  and  presently  began : 

"A  parrot,  gentlemen,  is  the  meanest  of  all 
creation.  People  who  are  acquainted  with  par- 
rots, and  I  don't  know  that  you  are,  generally 
admit  that  there  is  nothing  that  can  make  a 
parrot  ashamed  of  himself.  Now  this  is  a  mis- 
take, for  I've  seen  a  parrot  made  ashamed  of 
himself,  and  he  was  the  most  conceited  parrot 
that  was  ever  seen  outside  of  Congress.  It 
happened  in  this  way. 

"  I  came  home  one  day  and  found  a  parrot  in 
the  house.  My  daughter  Mamie  had  bought 
him  from  a  sailor  who  was  tramping  through  the 
town.  Said  he  had  been  shipwrecked,  and  he 
and  the  parrot  were  the  only  persons  saved.  He 
had  made  up  his  mind  never  to  part  with  that 
bird,  but  he  was  so  anxious  to  get  to  the  town 
where  his  mother  lived  that  he  would  sell  him 
for  a  dollar.  So  Mamie  she  buys  him,  and 
hangs  him  up  in  the  parlor  and  waits  for  him 
to  talk. 

"  It  turned  out  that  the  parrot  couldn't  talk 


•     :  '   ft   ••'*:. 


ASKING  THE  CAT  IF  HE  HAD  EVER  SEEN  A  MOUSE.' 
5 


6  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

anything  but  Spanish,  and  very  little  of  that. 
And  he  wouldn't  learn  a  word  of  English, 
though  my  daughter  worked  over  him  as  if  he 
had  been  a  whole  Sunday-school.  But  one  day 
he  all  at  once  began  to  teach  himself  English. 
Invented  a  sort  of  Ollendorff  way  of  studying, 
perhaps  because  he  had  heard  Mamie  studying 
French  that  way.  He'd  begin  by  saying,  'Does 
Polly  want  a  cracker?'  and  then  he'd  go  on  and 
ring  the  changes.  For  example,  just  to  give 
you  an  idea  of  the  system,  he'd  say,  'Does  Polly 
want  the  lead  cracker  of  the  plumber  or  the 
gold  cracker  of  the  candlestick  maker?'  and 
then  he'd  answer,  'No,  Polly  does  not  want  the 
lead  cracker  of  the  plumber  nor  the  gold  cracker 
of  the  candlestick  maker,  but  the  large  steel 
cracker  of  the  blacksmith. '  He  used  to  study 
in  this  way  three  hours  every  morning  and 
three  every  afternoon,  and  never  stop  for  Sun- 
days, being,  as  I  suppose,  a  Roman  Catholic, 
and  not  a  Sabbath-keeping  bird.  I  never  saw 
a  bird  so  bent  on  learning  a  language  as  this 
one  was,  and  he  fetched  it.  In  three  months' 
time  that  parrot  could  talk  English  as  well  as 


AN   ORNITHOLOGICAL   ROMANCE.  7 

you  or  I,  and  a  blamed  sight  better  than  that 
waiter  who  pretends  that  he  talks  English.  The 
trouble  was  the  parrot  would  talk  all  the  time 
when  he  was  not  asleep.  My  wife  is  no  slouch 
at  talking,  but  I've  seen  her  burst  into  tears 
and  say,  'It's  no  use,  I  can't  get  in  a  word  edge- 
wise. '  And  no  more  could  she.  That  bird  was 
just  talking  us  deaf,  dumb,  and  blind.  The  cat, 
he  gave  it  up  at  an  early  stage  of  the  proceed- 
ings. The  parrot  was  so  personal  in  his  re- 
marks— asking  the  cat  if  he  had  ever  seen  a 
mouse  in  his  whole  life,  and  wanting  to  know 
who  it  was  that  helped  him  to  paint  the  back 
fence  red  the  other  night,  till  the  cat,  after  curs- 
ing till  all  was  blue,  went  out  of  the  house  and 
never  showed  up  again.  He  hadn't  the  slight- 
est regard  for  anybody's  feelings,  that  bird 
hadn't.  No  parrot  ever  has. 

"  He  wasn't  content  with  talking  three-fourths 
of  the  time,  but  he  had  a  habit  of  thinking  out 
loud  which  was  far  worse  than  his  conversation. 
For  instance,  when  young  Jones  called  of  an 
evening  on  my  daughter,  the  parrot  would  say, 
'Well,  I  suppose  that  young  idiot  will  stay  till 


8  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

midnight,  and  keep  the  whole  house  awake  as 
usual. '  Or  when  the  Unitarian  minister  came 
to  see  my  wife  the  parrot  would  just  as  likely 
as  not  remark,  'Why  don't  he  hire  a  hall  if  he 
must  preach,  instead  of  coming  here  and  wear- 
ing out  the  furniture?'  Nobody  would  believe 
that  the  parrot  made  these  remarks  of  his  own 
accord,  but  insisted  that  we  must  have  taught 
them  to  him.  Naturally,  folks  didn't  like  this 
sort  of  thing,  and  after  a  while  hardly  anybody 
came  inside  our  front  door. 

"And  then  that  bird  developed  a  habit  of 
bragging  that  was  simply  disgusting.  He 
would  sit  up  by  the  hour  and  brag  about  his 
superiority  to  other  birds,  and  the  beauty  of  his 
feathers,  and  his  cage,  and  the  gorgeousness  of 
the  parlor,  and  the  general  meanness  of  every- 
thing except  himself  and  his  possessions.  He 
made  me  so  tired  that  I  sometimes  wished  I 
were  deaf.  You  see,  it  was  the  infernal  igno- 
rance of  the  bird  that  aggravated  me.  He 
didn't  know  a  thing  of  the  world  outside  of 
our  parlor;  and  yet  he'd  brag  and  brag  till  you 
couldn't  rest. 


10  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

"You  may  ask  why  didn't  we  kill  him,  or 
sell  him,  or  give  him  to  the  missionaries,  or 
something  of  that  sort.  Well,  Mamie,  she  said 
it  would  be  the  next  thing  to  murder  if  we  were 
to  wring  his  neck ;  and  that  selling  him  would 
be  about  the  same  as  the  slave-trade.  She 
wouldn't  let  me  take  the  first  step  toward  get- 
ting rid  of  the  parrot,  and  the  prospect  was  that 
he'd  drive  us  clean  out  of  the  house. 

"  One  day  a  man  who  had  had  considerable 
experience  of  parrots  happened  to  come  in,  and 
when  I  complained  of  the  bird  he  said,  'Why 
don't  you  get  an  owl?  You  get  an  owl  and 
hang  him  up  close  to  that  parrot's  cage,  and  in 
about  two  days  you'll  find  that  your  bird's  dead 
sick  of  unprofitable  conversation.' 

"  Well,  I  got  a  small  owl  and  put  him  in  a 
cage  close  to  the  parrot's  cage.  The  parrot 
began  by  trying  to  dazzle  the  owl  with  his  con- 
versation, but  it  wouldn't  work.  The  owl  sat 
and  looked  at  the  parrot  just  as  solemn  as  a 
minister  whose  salary  has  been  cut  down,  and 
after  a  while  the  parrot  tried  him  with  Spanish. 
It  wasn't  of  any  use.  Not  a  word  would  the 


AN   ORNITHOLOGICAL   ROMANCE.  11 

owl  let  on  to  understand.  Then  the  parrot  tried 
bragging,  and  laid  himself  out  to  make  the  owl 
believe  that  of  all  the  parrots  in  existence  he 
was  the  ablest.  But  he  couldn't  turn  a  feather 
of  the  owl.  That  noble  bird  sat  silent  as  the 
grave,  and  looked  at  the  parrot  as  if  to  say, 
'This  is  indeed  a  melancholy  exhibition  of  im- 
becility!' Well,  before  night  that  parrot  was 
so  ashamed  of  himself  that  he  closed  for  repairs, 
and  from  that  day  forth  he  never  spoke  an  un- 
necessary word.  Such,  gentlemen,  is  the  influ- 
ence of  example  even  on  the  worst  of  birds." 

The  American  lit  a  fresh  cigar,  and  pulling 
his  hat  over  his  eyes,  fell  into  profound  medita- 
tion. His  three  auditors  made  no  comment  on 
his  story,  and  did  not  repeat  the  inquiry  why 
he  had  asked  the  waiter  for  an  owl.  They 
smoked  in  silence  for  some  moments,  and  then 
one  of  them  invited  the  other  two  to  step  over 
to  Henry's  and  take  something — an  invitation 
which  they  promptly  accepted,  and  the  smoking- 
room  knew  them  no  more  that  night. 


JEWSEPPY. 

"YES,  sir!"  said  the  Colonel.  "Being  an 
American,  I'm  naturally  in  favor  of  elevating 
the  oppressed  and  down-trodden,  provided,  of 
course,  they  live  in  other  countries.  All  Amer- 
icans are  in  favor  of  Home  Rule  for  Ireland, 
because  it  would  elevate  the  Irish  masses  and 
keep  them  at  home ;  but  if  I  were  living  in  Ire- 
land, perhaps  I  might  prefer  elevating  Russian 
Jews  or  Bulgarian  Christians.  You  see,  the 
trouble  with  elevating  the  oppressed  at  home  is 
that  the  moment  you  get  them  elevated  they 
begin  to  oppress  you.  There  is  no  better  fellow 
in  the  world  than  the  Irishman,  so  long  as  you 
govern  him ;  but  when  he  undertakes  to  govern 
you  it's  time  to  look  out  for  daybreak  to  west- 
ward. You  see,  we've  been  there  and  know 
all  about  it. 

"Did  I  ever  tell  you  about  Jewseppy?     He 

12 


JEWSEPPY.  13 

was  an  organ-grinder,  and,  take  him  by  and 
large,  he  was  the  best  organ-grinder  I  ever  met. 
He  could  throw  an  amount  of  expression  into 
'Annie  Rooney,'  or,  it  might  be,  'The  Old 
Folks  at  Home, '  that  would  make  the  strongest 
men  weep  and  heave  anything  at  him  that  they 
could  lay  their  hands  to.  He  wasn't  a  Jew,  as 
you  might  suppose  from  his  name,  but  only 
an  Italian — '  Jewseppy  '  being  what  the  Italians 
would  probably  call  a  Christian  name  if  they 
were  Christians.  I  knew  him  when  I  lived  in 
Oshkosh,  some  twenty  years  ago.  My  daugh- 
ter, who  had  studied  Italian,  used  to  talk  to  him 
in  his  native  language ;  that  is,  she  would  ask 
him  if  he  was  cold,  or  hungry,  or  ashamed,  or 
sleepy,  as  the  books  direct,  but  as  he  never  an- 
swered in  the  way  laid  down  in  the  books,  my 
daughter  couldn't  understand  a  word  he  said, 
and  so  the  conversation  would  begin  to  flag.  I 
used  to  talk  to  him  in  English,  which  he  could 
speak  middling  well,  and  I  found  him  cranky, 
but  intelligent. 

"  He  was  a  little,  wizened,  half-starved-look- 
ing  man,  and  if  he  had  only  worn  shabby  black 


14  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

clothes,  you  would  have  taken  him  for  a  mil- 
lionaire's confidential  clerk,  he  was  so  miser- 
able in  appearance.  He  had  two  crazes — one 
was  for  monkeys,  who  were,  he  said,  precisely 
like  men,  only  they  had  four  hands  and  tails, 
which  they  could  use  as  lassoes,  all  of  which  were 
in  the  nature  of  modern  improvements,  and 
showed  that  they  were  an  advance  on  the  orig- 
inal pattern  of  men.  His  other  craze  was  his 
sympathy  for  the  oppressed.  He  wanted  to  lib- 
erate everybody,  including  convicts,  and  have 
every  one  made  rich  by  law  and  allowed  to  do 
anything  he  might  want  to  do.  He  was  what 
you  would  call  an  Anarchist  to-day,  only  he 
didn't  believe  in  disseminating  his  views  by 
dynamite. 

"  He  had  a  monkey  that  died  of  consumption, 
and  the  way  that  Jewseppy  grieved  for  the 
monkey  would  have  touched  the  heart  of  an 
old-fashioned  Calvinist,  let  alone  a  heart  of  or- 
dinary stone.  For  nearly  a  month  he  wandered 
around  without  his  organ,  occasionally  doing 
odd  jobs  of  work,  which  made  most  people  think 
that  he  was  going  out  of  his  mind.  But  one 


I — V 


''SHE  WOULD  ASK  HIM  IF  HE  WAS  COLD  OR  HUNGRY. 


15 


16  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

day  a  menagerie  came  to  town,  and  in  the  men- 
agerie was  what  the  show-bill  called  a  gorilla. 
It  wasn't  a  genuine  gorilla,  as  Professor  Ama- 
riah  G.  Twitchell,  of  our  university,  proved 
after  the  menagerie  men  had  refused  to  give 
him  and  his  family  free  tickets.  However,  it 
was  an  animal  to  that  effect,  and  it  would  prob- 
ably have  made  a  great  success,  for  our  pub- 
lic, though  critical,  is  quick  to  recognize  real 
merit,  if  it  wasn't  that  the  beast  was  very  sick. 
This  was  Jewseppy's  chance,  and  he  went  for 
it  as  if  he  had  been  a  born  speculator.  He  of- 
fered to  buy  the  gorilla  for  two  dollars,  and  the 
menagerie  men,  thinking  the  animal  was  as 
good  as  dead,  were  glad  to  get  rid  of  it,  and 
calculated  that  Jewseppy  would  never  get  the 
worth  of  the  smallest  fraction  of  his  two  dollars. 
There  is  where  they  got  left,  for  Jewseppy 
knew  more  about  monkeys  than  any  man  liv- 
ing, and  could  cure  any  sick  monkey  that 
called  him  in,  provided,  of  course,  the  disease 
was  one  which  medical  science  could  collar. 
In  the  course  of  a  month  he  got  the  gorilla 
thoroughly  repaired,  and  was  giving  him  les- 


JEWSEPPY.  17 

sons   in    the    theory   and    practice    of    organ- 
grinding. 

"  The  gorilla  didn't  take  to  the  work  kindly, 
which,  Jewseppy  said,  was  only  another  proof 
of  his  grand  intellect,  but  Jewseppy  trained 
him  so  well  that  it  was  not  long  before  he  could 
take  the  animal  with  him  when  he  went  out 
with  the  organ,  and  have  him  pass  the  plate. 
The  gorilla  always  had  a  line  round  his  waist, 
and  Jewseppy  held  the  end  of  it,  and  sort  of 
telegraphed  to  him  through  it  when  he  wanted 
him  to  come  back  to  the  organ.  Then,  too,  he 
had  a  big  whip,  and  he  had  to  use  it  on  the 
gorilla  pretty  often.  Occasionally  he  had  to 
knock  the  animal  over  the  head  with  the  butt 
end  of  the  whip-handle,  especially  when  he  was 
playing  something  on  the  organ  that  the  gorilla 
didn't  like,  such  as  'Marching  through  Geor- 
gia,' for  instance.  The  gorilla  was  a  great 
success  as  a  plate-passer,  for  all  the  men  were 
anxious  to  see  the  animal,  and  all  the  women 
were  afraid  not  to  give  something  when  the 
beast  put  the  plate  under  their  noses.  You  see, 
he  was  as  strong  as  two  or  three  men,  and  his 


18  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

arms  were  as  long  as  the  whole  of  his  body,  not 
to  mention  that  his  face  was  a  deep  blue,  all  of 
which  helped  to  make  him  the  most  persuasive 
beast  that  ever  took  up  a  collection. 

"  Jewseppy  had  so  much  to  say  to  me  about 
the  gorilla's  wonderful  intelligence  that  he  made 
me  tired,  and  one  day  I  asked  him  if  he  thought 
it  was  consistent  with  his  principles  to  keep  the 
animal  in  slavery.  'You  say  he  is  all  the  same 
as  a  man,'  said  I.  'Then  why  don't  you  give 
him  a  show?  You  keep  him  oppressed  and 
down-trodden  the  whole  time.  Why  don't  you 
let  him  grind  the  organ  for  a  while,  and  take  up 
the  collection  yourself?  Turn  about  is  fair  play, 
and  I  can't  see  why  the  gorilla  shouldn't  have 
his  turn  at  the  easy  end  of  the  business. '  The 
idea  seemed  to  strike  Jewseppy  where  he  lived. 
He  was  a  consistent  idiot.  I'll  give  him  credit 
for  that.  He  wasn't  ready  to  throw  over  his 
theories  every  time  he  found  they  didn't  pay. 
Now  that  I  had  pointed  out  to  him  his  duty 
toward  the  gorilla,  he  was  disposed  to  do  it. 

"  You  see,  he  reasoned  that  while  it  would  only 
be  doing  justice  to  the  beast  to  change  places 


20  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

with  him,  it  would  probably  increase  the  re- 
ceipts. When  a  man  can  do  his  duty  and  make 
money  by  it  his  path  is  middling  plain;  and 
after  Jewseppy  had  thought  it  over  he  saw  that 
he  must  do  justice  to  the  gorilla  without  delay. 

"It  didn't  take  the  beast  long  to  learn  the 
higher  branches  of  hand-organing. 

"  He  saw  the  advantages  of  putting  the  money 
in  his  own  pocket  instead  of  collecting  it  and 
handing  it  over  to  Jewseppy,  and  he  grasped 
the  idea  that  when  he  was  pushing  the  little 
cart  that  carried  the  organ  and  turning  the 
handle,  he  was  holding  a  much  better  place  in 
the  community  than  when  he  was  dancing  and 
begging  at  the  end  of  a  rope.  I  thought,  a  day 
or  two  after  I  had  talked  to  Jewseppy,  that 
there  was  considerable  uproar  in  town,  but  I 
didn't  investigate  it  until  toward  evening,  when 
there  seemed  to  be  a  sort  of  riot  or  temperance 
meeting,  or  something  of  the  kind,  in  front  of 
my  house,  and  I  went  out  to  see  about  it.  There 
were  nearly  two  thousand  people  there  watching 
Jewseppy  and  his  gorilla,  or  rather  the  gorilla 
and  his  Jewseppy.  The  little  man  had  been 


JEWSEPPY.  21 

elevating  the  oppressed  with  great  success.  A 
long  rope  was  tied  around  his  waist,  and  he 
was  trotting  around  among  the  people,  taking 
up  the  collection  and  dancing  between  times. 

"  The  gorilla  was  wearing  Jewseppy's  coat, 
and  was  grinding  away  at  the  organ  with  one 
hand  and  holding  Jewseppy's  rope  with  the 
other.  Every  few  minutes  he  would  haul  in 
the  rope,  hand  over  hand,  empty  all  the  money 
out  of  Jewseppy's  pocket,  and  start  him  out 
again.  If  the  man  stopped  to  speak  to  anybody 
for  a  moment  the  gorilla  would  haul  him  in  and 
give  him  a  taste  of  the  whip,  and  if  he  didn't 
collect  enough  money  to  suit  the  gorilla's  idea, 
the  animal  would  hold  him  out  at  arm's  length 
with  one  hand  and  lay  into  him  with  the  other 
till  the  crowd  were  driven  wild  with  delight. 
Nothing  could  induce  them  to  think  that  Jew- 
seppy  was  in  earnest  when  he  begged  them  to 
protect  him.  They  supposed  it  was  all  a  part 
of  the  play,  and  the  more  he  implored  them  to 
set  him  free,  the  more  they  laughed  and  said 
that  'thish  yer  Eyetalian  was  a  bang-up  actor.' 

"  As  soon  as  Jewseppy  saw  me  he  began  to  tell 


22  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

me  of  his  sufferings.  His  story  lacked  conti- 
nuity, as  you  might  say,  for  he  would  no  sooner 
get  started  in  his  narrative  than  the  gorilla 
would  jerk  the  rope  as  a  reminder  to  him  to  at- 
tend strictly  to  business  if  he  wanted  to  succeed 
in  his  profession.  Jewseppy  said  that  as  soon 
as  he  tied  the  rope  around  his  waist  and  put  the 
handle  of  the  organ  in  the  gorilla's  hand  the 
beast  saw  his  chance  and  proceeded  to  take  ad- 
vantage of  it.  He  had  already  knocked  the 
man  down  twice  with  the  handle  of  the  whip, 
and  had  lashed  him  till  he  was  black  and  blue, 
besides  keeping  him  at  work  since  seven  o'clock 
that  morning  without  anything  to  eat  or  drink. 
"  At  this  point  the  gorilla  hauled  Jewseppy  in 
and  gave  him  a  fairly  good  thrashing  for  wast- 
ing his  time  in  conversation.  When  the  man 
came  around  again  with  the  plate  I  told  him 
that  he  was  taking  in  more  money  than  he  had 
ever  taken  in  before,  and  that  this  ought  to  con- 
sole him,  even  if  the  consciousness  that  he  was 
doing  justice  to  the  oppressed  had  no  charms 
for  him.  I'm  sorry  to  say  that  Jewseppy  used 
such  bad  language  that  I  really  couldn't  stay 


"WEARING  JEWSEPPY'S  COAT,  AND  WAS  GRINDING  AWAY  AT  THE  ORGAN." 
23 


24  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

and  listen  to  him  any  longer.  I  understood  him 
to  say  that  the  gorilla  took  possession  of  every 
penny  that  was  collected,  and  would  be  sure  to 
spend  it  on  himself,  but  as  this  was  only  what 
Jewseppy  had  been  accustomed  to  do  it  ought 
not  to  have  irritated  a  man  with  a  real  sense  of 
justice.  Of  course  I  was  sorry  that  the  little 
man  was  being  ill  treated,  but  he  was  tough, 
and  I  thought  that  it  would  not  hurt  him  if  the 
gorilla  were  to  carry  out  his  course  of  instruc- 
tion in  the  duty  of  elevating  the  oppressed  a 
little  longer.  I  have  always  been  sort  of  sorry 
that  I  did  not  interfere,  for  although  Jewseppy 
was  only  a  foreigner  who  couldn't  vote,  and 
was  besides  altogether  too  set  in  his  ideas,  I 
didn't  want  him  to  come  to  any  real  harm. 
After  that  day  no  man  ever  saw  Jewseppy,  dead 
or  alive.  He  was  seen  about  dusk  two  or  three 
miles  from  town  on  the  road  to  Sheboygan.  He 
was  still  tied  to  the  rope  and  was  using  a  lot 
of  bad  language,  while  the  gorilla  was  fre- 
quently reminding  him  with  the  whip  of  the 
real  duties  of  his  station  and  the  foil}7  of  dis- 
content and  rebellion.  That  was  the  last  any- 


JEWSEPPY.  25 

body  ever  saw  of  the  Italian.  The  gorilla  turned 
up  the  next  day  at  a  neighboring  town  with  his 
organ,  but  without  anybody  to  take  up  the  col- 
lection for  him,  and  as  the  menagerie  happened 
to  be  there  the  menagerie  men  captured  him 
and  put  him  back  in  his  old  cage,  after  having 
confiscated  the  organ.  No  one  thought  of  mak- 
ing any  search  for  Jewseppy,  for,  as  I  have  said, 
he  had  never  been  naturalized  and  had  no  vote, 
and  there  were  not  enough  Italians  in  that  part 
of  the  country  to  induce  any  one  to  take  an  in- 
terest in  bringing  them  to  the  polls.  It  was 
generally  believed  that  the  gorilla  had  made 
away  with  Jewseppy,  thinking  that  he  could 
carry  on  the  organ  business  to  more  advantage 
without  him.  It's  always  been  my  impression 
that  if  Jewseppy  had  lived  he  would  have  been 
cured  of  the  desire  to  elevate  the  down-trodden, 
except,  of  course,  in  foreign  countries.  He 
was  an  excellent  little  man — enthusiastic,  warm- 
hearted, and  really  believing  in  his  talk  about 
the  rights  of  monkeys  and  the  duty  of  elevating 
everybody.  But  there  isn't  the  least  doubt  that 
he  made  a  mistake  when  he  tried  to  do  justice 
to  that  gorilla. 


THAT  LITTLE  FRENCHMAN. 

"  DOES  anybody  doubt  my  patriotism?"  asked 
the  Colonel.  We  all  hastened  to  say  that  we 
should  as  soon  doubt  our  own  existence.  Had 
he  not  made  a  speech  no  longer  ago  than  last 
Fourth  of  July,  showing  that  America  was  des- 
tined to  have  a  population  of  1,000,000,000  and 
that  England  was  on  the  verge  of  extinction? 
Had  he  not  perilled  his  life  in  the  cause  of  free- 
dom, and  was  he  not  tireless  in  insisting  that 
every  Chinaman  should  be  driven  out  of  the 
United  States?  If  there  ever  was  one  Ameri- 
can more  patriotic  than  another  it  was  the 
Colonel. 

"Well,  then,"  continued  the  speaker,  "you 
won't  misunderstand  me  when  I  say  that  the 
American  railroad  car  is  a  hundred  times  more 
dangerous  than  these  European  compartment 

cars.     In  thirty  years  there  have  been  just  four 

26 


THAT   LITTLE   FRENCHMAN.  27 

felonious  assaults  in  English  railroad  cars. 
There  have  been  a  few  more  than  that  in  France, 
but  not  a  single  one  in  Germany.  Now,  I  admit 
that  you  are  in  no  danger  of  being  shot  in  an 
American  car,  unless,  of  course,  two  gentlemen 
happen  to  have  a  difficulty  and  shoot  wild,  or 
unless  the  train  is  held  up  by  train  robbers  who 
are  a  little  too  free  with  their  weapons.  But  I 
do  say  that  the  way  in  which  we  heat  our  cars 
with  coal-stoves  kills  thousands  of  passengers 
with  pneumonia  and  burns  hundreds  alive 
when  the  trains  are  wrecked. 

"You  see,  I've  looked  into  this  thing  and 
I've  got  the  statistics  down  fine.  I'm  the  only 
man  I  know  who  ever  had  any  trouble  with 
a  passenger  while  travelling  in  Europe,  and  I 
don't  mind  telling  you  about  it,  although  it  will 
be  giving  myself  away.  Kindly  push  me  over 
those  matches,  will  you?  These  French  cigars 
take  a  lot  of  fuel,  and  you  have  to  encourage 
them  with  a  match  every  three  minutes  if  you 
expect  them  to  burn. 

"  When  I  was  over  here  in  Paris,  ten  years 
ago,  there  was  a  fellow  here  from  Chicago  who 


28  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

was  trying  to  introduce  American  cars,  and  he 
gave  me  a  pamphlet  he  had  got  up  showing  the 
horrors  of  the  compartment  system.  It  told  of 
half  a  dozen  murders,  fifteen  assaults,  eleven 
cases  of  blackmail,  and  four  cases  in  which  a 
solitary  traveller  was  shut  up  in  a  compartment 
with  a  lunatic — all  these  incidents  having  oc- 
curred on  European  railways.  I  was  on  my  way 
to  Egypt,  and  when  I  had  read  the  pamphlet  I 
began  to  wonder  if  I  should  ever  manage  to  live 
through  the  railroad  journey  without  being 
killed,  or  blackmailed,  or  lunaticked,  or  some- 
thing of  the  kind.  You  see,  I  believed  the 
stories  then,  though  I  know  now  that  about 
half  of  them  were  false. 

"  I  took  the  express  train — the  Peninsular  and 
Oriental  they  call  it — from  Paris  about  twelve 
o'clock  one  night.  I  went  early  to  the  train, 
and  until  just  before  we  started  I  thought  I 
was  going  to  have  the  compartment  to  myself. 
All  at  once  a  man  very  much  out  of  breath 
jumped  in,  the  door  was  slammed,  and  we 
were  off. 

"I  didn't  like  the  looks  of  the  fellow.     He 


DOES  ANYBODY  DOUBT  MY  PATRIOTISM?  '  ASKED  THE  COLONEL." 

29 


30  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

was  a  Frenchman,  though  of  course  that  wasn't 
his  fault.  He  was  small  but  wiry-looking,  and 
his  sharp  black  eyes  were  not  the  style  of  eyes 
that  inspires  me  with  confidence.  Then  he  had 
no  baggage  except  a  small  paper  parcel,  which 
was  queer,  considering  that  the  train  was  a  long- 
distance one.  I  kept  a  close  watch  on  him  for  a 
while,  thinking  that  he  might  be  one  of  the  pro- 
fessional lunatics  that,  according  to  the  Chicago 
chap's  pamphlet,  are  always  travelling  in  order 
to  frighten  solitary  passengers ;  but  after  a  while 
I  became  so  sleepy  that  I  decided  to  lie  down 
and  take  a  nap  and  my  chances  of  being  killed 
at  the  same  time.  Just  then  the  man  gets  up 
and  begins  to  talk  to  me  in  French. 

"  Now,  I  needn't  say  that  I  don't  speak  French 
nor  any  of  those  fool  languages.  Good  Ameri- 
can is  go'od  enough  for  me.  One  reason  why 
these  Europeans  have  been  enslaved  for  cen- 
turies is  that  they  can't  make  each  other  under- 
stand their  views  without  shouting  at  the  top  of 
their  lungs,  and  so  bringing  the  police  about  their 
ears.  But  I  did  happen  to  know,  or  thought 
I  did,  the  French  word  for  going  to  sleep, 


THAT   LITTLE   FRENCHMAN.  31 

and  so  I  thought  I  would  just  heave  it  at  this 
chap  so  that  he  would  understand  that  I  didn't 
require  his  conversation.  I  have  always  found 
that  if  you  talk  to  a  Frenchman  in  English  very 
slowly  and  impressively  he  will  get  the  hang  of 
what  you  say.  That  is,  if  he  isn't  a  cabman. 
You  can't  get  an  idea  into  a  French  cabman's 
head  unless  you  work  it  in  with  a  club.  So  I 
said  to  the  fellow  in  the  train:  'My  friend!  I 
haven't  any  time  to  waste  in  general  conversa- 
tion. I'm  going  to  sleep,  and  I  advise  you  to 
do  the  same.  You  can  tell  me  all  about  your 
institutions  and  your  revolutions  and  things  in 
the  morning. '  And  then  I  hove  in  the  French 
word  'cochon,'  which  I  supposed  meant  some- 
thing like  '  Now  I  lay  me  down  to  sleep. ' 

"  The  fellow  staggered  back  as  if  I  had  hit 
him,  and  then  he  began  to  sling  the  whole 
French  language  at  me.  I  calculate  that  he 
could  have  given  Bob  Ingersoll  fifty  points  in  a 

hundred  and  beaten  him,  and,  as  you  know, 

• 

Bob  is  the  ablest  vituperator  now  in  the  busi- 
ness. The  Frenchman  kept  on  raving  and  get- 
ting madder  and  madder  every  minute,  and  I 


32  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

saw  that  there  wasn't  the  least  doubt  that  he 
was  a  dangerous  lunatic. 

"  I  stood  up  and  let  him  talk  for  a  while,  oc- 
casionally saying  'non  comprenny'  and  'cochon,' 
just  to  soothe  him,  but  presently  he  came  close 
to  me  and  shook  his  fist  in  my  face.  This  was 
too  much,  so  I  took  him  by  the  shoulders  and 
slammed  him  down  in  a  corner  seat,  and  said, 
'You  sit  there,  sonny,  and  keep  quiet,  or  you'll 
end  by  getting  me  to  argue  with  you. '  But  the 
minute  I  let  go  of  him  he  bounced  up  again  as 
if  he  was  made  of  India-rubber,  and  came  at  me 
just  as  a  terrier  will  come  at  a  horse,  pretend- 
ing that  he  is  going  to  tear  him  into  small 
pieces.  So  I  slammed  him  down  into  his  corner 
again,  and  said,  'This  foolishness  has  gone  far 
enough,  and  we'll  have  it  stopped  right  here. 
Didn't  you  hear  me  say  cochon?  I'm  going  to 
cochon,  and  you'd  better  cochon,  too,  or  I'll 
make  you.' 

"  This  time  he  jumped  up  as  soon  as  I  had  let 
go  of  him  and  tried  to  hit  me.  Of  course  I 
didn't  want  to  hit  so  small  a  chap,  letting  alone 
that  he  knew  no  more  about  handling  his  fists 


THAT   LITTLE   FRENCHMAN.  33 

than  the  angel  Gabriel,  so  I  just  took  and  twisted 
his  arms  behind  his  back  and  tied  them  with  a 
shawl-strap.  Then,  seeing  as  he  showed  a  repre- 
hensible disposition  to  kick,  I  put  another  strap 
around  his  legs  and  stretched  him  on  the  seat 
with  his  bundle  under  his  head.  But  kindness 
was  thrown  away  on  that  Frenchman.  He 
tried  to  bite  me,  and  not  content  with  spitting 
like  a  cat,  he  set  up  a  yell  that  was  the  next 
thing  to  the  locomotive  whistle,  and  rolling  off 
the  seat  tried  to  kick  at  me  with  both  legs. 

"  I  let  him  exercise  himself  for  a  few  minutes, 
while  I  got  my  hair-brush  and  some  twine  out 
of  my  bag.  Then  I  put  him  back  on  the  seat, 
gagged  him  with  the  handle  of  the  hair-brush, 
and  lashed  him  to  the  arm  of  the  seat  so  that 
he  couldn't  roll  off.  Then  I  offered  him  a  drink, 
but  he  shook  his  head,  not  having  any  manners, 
in  spite  of  what  people  say  about  the  politeness 
of  Frenchmen.  Having  secured  my  own  safety 
and  made  the  lunatic  reasonably  comfortable,  I 
turned  in  and  went  to  sleep.  I  must  have  slept 
very  sound,  for  although  the  train  stopped  two  or 

three  times  during  the  night,  I  never  woke  up 
3 


34  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

until  we  pulled  up  for  breakfast  about  eight 
'oclock  the  next  morning.  I  sat  up  and  looked  at 
my  lunatic,  who  was  wide  awake  and  glaring  at 
me.  I  wished  him  good-morning,  for  I  couldn't 
bear  any  grudge  against  a  crazy  man ;  but  he 
only  rolled  his  eyes  and  seemed  madder  than 
ever,  so  I  let  him  lie  and  got  out  of  the  train. 

"  Two  policemen  were  walking  up  and  down 
the  platform,  and  I  took  one  of  them  by  the  arm 
and  led  him  to  the  car,  explaining  what  had 
happened.  I  don't  know  whether  he  understood 
or  not,  but  he  pretended  that  he  didn't. 

"  As  soon  as  he  saw  the  lunatic  there  was  a 
pretty  row.  He  called  two  more  policemen,  and 
after  they  had  ungagged  the  fellow  they  hauled 
us  both  before  a  magistrate  who  had  his  office 
in  the  railroad  station.  At  least  he  acted  like 
a  magistrate,  although  he  wore  the  same  uni- 
form as  the  policemen.  Here  the  fellow  I  had 
travelled  with  was  allowed  to  speak  first,  and 
he  charged  me,  as  I  afterward  found,  with  hav- 
ing first  insulted  and  then  assaulted  him.  He 
said  he  rather  thought  I  was  a  lunatic,  but  at 
any  rate  he  must  have  my  blood.  Then  an  in- 


35 


36  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

terpreter  was  sent  for,  and  I  told  my  story,  but 
I  could  see  that  nobody  believed  me. 

"'Accused,'  said  the  magistrate  very  sternly, 
'you  called  this  gentleman  a  pig.  What  was 
your  motive?' 

"  Of  course  I  swore  that  I  had  never  called 
him  a  pig,  that  I  hardly  knew  half  a  dozen 
words  of  his  infamous  language,  and  that  I  had 
used  only  one  of  those.  Being  asked  what  it 
was,  I  said  'cochon.'  And  then  that  idiot  or- 
dered me  to  be  locked  up. 

"  By  rare  good  luck  there  happened  to  be  an 
American  secretary  of  legation  on  the  train. 
You  know  him.  It  was  Hiram  G.  Trask,  of 
West  Centreopolis.  He  recognized  me,  and  it 
didn't  take  him  very  long  to  explain  the  whole 
affair.  It  seems  that  the  Frenchman  had  asked 
me  if  I  objected  to  smoking,  and  when  I  tried 
to  tell  him  that  we  ought  to  go  to  sleep,  I  said 
'cochon,'  which  means  pig,  instead  of  'cou- 
chons, '  which  was  the  word  I  ought  to  have  used. 
He  was  no  more  of  a  lunatic  than  a  Frenchman 
naturally  is,  but  he  was  disgusted  at  being  car- 
ried two  hundred  miles  beyond  his  destination, 


THAT   LITTLE   FRENCHMAN.  37 

which  was  the  first  stopping-place  beyond  Paris, 
and  I  don't  know  that  I  blame  him  very  much. 
And  then,  too,  he  seemed  to  feel  that  his  dig- 
nity had  been  some  ruffled  by  being  gagged  and 
bound.  However,  both  he  and  the  policemen 
listened  to  reason,  and  the  man  agreed  to  com- 
promise on  my  pa)ring  him  damages  and  with- 
drawing the  assertion  that  he  was  morally  or 
physically  a  pig.  The  affair  cost  considerable, 
but  it  taught  me  a  lesson,  and  I  have  quit  be- 
lieving that  you  can't  travel  in  a  European  rail- 
road car  without  being  locked  up  with  a  lunatic 
or  a  murderer.  I  admit  that  the  whole  trouble 
was  due  to  my  foolishness.  When  the  French- 
man began  to  make  a  row,  I  ought  to  have 
killed  him  and  dropped  the  body  out  of  the 
door,  instead  of  fooling  with  him  half  the  night 
and  trying  to  make  him  comfortable.  But  we 
can't  always  command  presence  of  mind  or  see 
just  where  our  duty  lies  at  all  times." 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE. 

WE  had  just  dined  in  the  little  Parisian  res- 
taurant where  Americans  are  in  the  habit  of 
going  in  order  to  obtain  those  truly  French  deli- 
cacies, pork  and  beans,  buckwheat  cakes,  corned 
beef,  apple  pie,  and  overgrown  oysters.  I  knew 
a  man  from  Chicago  who  dined  at  this  restau- 
rant every  day  during  the  entire  month  spent 
by  him  in  Paris,  and  who,  at  the  end  of  that 
time,  said  that  he  was  heartily  sick  of  French 
cookery.  Thus  does  the  profound  study  of,  the 
manners  and  customs  of  foreign  nations  en- 
lighten the  mind  and  ripen  the  judgment. 

The  Colonel  had  finished  his  twelfth  buck- 
wheat cake  and  had  lighted  his  cigar,  when  he 
casually  and  reprovingly  remarked  to  young 
Lathrop,  who,  on  principle,  was  disputing  the 
bill  with  the  waiter,  that  "  he  was  making  more 

trouble  than  Thompson's  tombstone."     Being 
88 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE.  39 

called  upon  to  explain  this  dark  saying,  he 
stretched  his  legs  to  their  limit,  tipped  back  his 
chair,  knocked  the  ashes  of  his  cigar  among  the 
remnants  of  his  pork  and  beans,  and  launched 
into  his  story. 

"  In  the  town  where  I  was  raised — and  I'm 
not  going  to  give  away  the  name  of  it  at  present 
— there  were  two  brothers,  James  and  John 
Thompson.  They  were  twins  and  about  forty 
years  old,  as  I  should  judge.  James  was  a 
bachelor  and  John  he  was  a  widower,  and  they 
were  both  pretty  well  to  do  in  the  world,  for 
those  times  at  least.  John  was  a  farmer  and 
James  was  a  wagon  maker  and  owned  the  village 
hearse  besides,  which  he  let  out  for  funerals, 
generally  driving  it  himself,  so  that  any  profit 
that  was  to  be  made  out  of  a  melancholy  occa- 
sion he  could  make  without  sharing  it  with 
anybody.  Both  the  men  were  close-fisted,  and 
would  look  at  a  dollar  until  their  eyesight  began 
to  fail  before  they  could  bring  themselves  to 
spend  it.  It  was  this  miserly  spirit  that  brought 
about  the  trouble  that  I'm  going  to  tell  you  of. 

"  After  John  Thompson  had  been  a  widower 


40  TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL. 

so  long  that  the  unmarried  women  had  given  up 
calling  on  him  to  ask  his  advice  about  the  best 
way  of  raising  money  for  the  heathen,  and  had 
lost  all  expectation  that  any  one  of  them  would 
ever  gather  him  in,  he  suddenly  ups  and  marries 
Maria  Slocum,  who  used  to  keep  a  candy  store 
next  door  to  the  school-house  and  had  been  a 
confirmed  old  maid  for  twenty  years.  She  had 
a  little  money,  though,  and  folks  did  say  that 
she  could  have  married  James  Thompson  if  she 
had  been  willing  to  take  the  risk ;  but  the  fact 
that  James  alwa3Ts  had  the  hearse  standing  in 
his  carriage-house  made  him  unpopular  with 
the  ladies.  She  took  John  because  his  views 
on  infant  baptism  agreed  with  hers,  and  he 
took  her  because  she  had  a  good  reputation  for 
making  pies  and  was  economical  and  religious. 
"The  Thompson  brothers  owned  burial  lots 
in  the  new  cemetery  that  were  close  together. 
James,  of  course,  had,  so  far,  no  use  for  his  lot, 
but  John  had  begun  to  settle  his  by  burying  his 
first  wife  in  about  the  middle  of  it.  The  lot 
was  a  good-sized  one,  with  accommodation  for  a 
reasonably  large  family  without  crowding  them, 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE.  41 

and  without,  at  the  same  time,  scattering  them 
in  any  unsocial  way.  I  don't  know  how  it 
came  about,  but  no  sooner  was  John  married 
than  he  took  a  notion  to  put  up  a  tombstone  over 
his  first  wife.  He  thought  that  as  he  was  going 
to  incur  such  an  expense  he  would  manage  it 
so  that  he  wouldn't  have  to  incur  it  again;  and 
so  he  got  up  a  design  for  a  combination  family 
tombstone,  and  had  it  made,  and  carved,  and 
lettered,  and  set  up  in  his  burial  lot. 

"  Near  the  top  of  the  stone  was  John  Thomp- 
son's name,  the  date  of  his  birth,  and  a  blank 
space  for  the  date  of  his  death.  Next  came  the 
name  of  'Sarah  Jane,  beloved  wife  of  the 
above,'  and  the  date  of  her  birth  and  death. 
Then  came  the  name  of  'Maria,  beloved  and 
lamented  wife  of  the  above  John  Thompson,' 
with  the  date  of  her  birth  and  a  space  for  the 
date  of  her  death.  You  see,  John  worked  in 
this  little  compliment  about  Maria  being  'la- 
mented '  so  as  to  reconcile  her  to  having  the  date 
of  her  birth  given  away  to  the  public.  The 
lower  half  of  the  tombstone  was  left  vacant  so 
as  to  throw  in  a  few  children  should  any  such 


42  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

contingency  arise,  and  the  whole  advertisement 
ended  with  a  verse  of  a  hymn  setting  forth  that 
the  entire  Thompson  family  was  united  in  a 
better  land  above. 

"  The  cost  of  the  affair  was  about  the  same 
as  that  of  one  ordinary  tombstone,  the  maker 
agreeing  to  enter  the  dates  of  John's  death  and 
of  his  wife's  death  free  of  charge  whenever  the 
time  for  so  doing  might  arrive ;  and  also  agree- 
ing to  enter  the  names  of  any  children  that 
might  appear  at  a  very  low  rate.  The  tomb- 
stone attracted  a  great  deal  of  attention,  and 
the  summer  visitors  from  the  city  never  failed 
to  go  and  see  it.  John  was  proud  of  his  stroke 
of  economy,  and  used  to  say  that  he  wasn't  in 
danger  of  being  bankrupted  by  any  epidemic, 
as  those  people  were  who  held  that  every  person 
must  have  his  separate  tombstone.  Everybody 
admitted  that  the  Thompson  tombstone  gave 
more  general  amusement  to  the  public  than  any 
other  tombstone  in  the  whole  cemetery.  Every 
summer  night  John  used  to  walk  over  to  his  lot 
and  smoke  his  pipe,  leaning  on  the  fence  and 
reading  over  the  inscriptions.  And  then  he 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE.  43 

would  go  and  take  a  fresh  look  at  the  Rogers' 
lot,  where  there  were  nine  different  tombstones, 
and  chuckle  to  think  how  much  they  must  have 
cost  old  man  Rogers,  who  had  never  thought  of 
a  combination  family  tomb.  In  the  course  of 
about  three  years  the  inscriptions  had  grown, 
for  there  had  been  added  the  names  of  Charles 
Henry  and  William  Everett  Thompson,  'chil- 
dren of  the  above  John  and  Maria  Thompson, ' 
and  John  calculated  that  with  squeezing  he 
could  enter  four  more  children  on  the  same 
stone,  though  he  didn't  really  think  that  he 
would  ever  have  any  call  so  to  do. 

"  Well,  a  little  after  the  end  of  the  third  year 
John's  troubles  began.  He  took  up  with  Second 
Advent  notions  and  believed  tha,t  the  end  of 
the  world  would  arrive,  as  per  schedule,  on  the 
21st  of  November,  at  8:30  A.M.  Maria  said 
that  this  was  not  orthodox  and  that  she  wouldn't 
allow  any  such  talk  around  her  house.  Both  of 
them  were  set  in  their  ways,  and  what  with 
John  expressing  his  views  with  his  whip-handle 
and  Maria  expressing  hers  with  the  rolling-pin, 
they  didn't  seem  to  get  on  very  well  together, 


44  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

and  one  day  Maria  left  the  house  and  took  the 
train  to  Chicago,  where  she  got  a  divorce  and 
came  back  a  free  and  independent  woman. 
That  wasn't  all :  James  Thompson  now  saw  his 
chance.  He  offered  to  sell  out  the  hearse  busi- 
ness, and  after  waiting  ten  months,  so  as  to  give 
no  opportunity  for  scandal,  Maria  married  him. 
"John  didn't  seem  to  mind  the  loss  of  his 
wife  very  much  until  it  happened  to  occur  to 
him  that  his  combination  family  tombstone 
would  have  to  be  altered,  now  that  Maria  was 
not  his  wife  any  longer.  He  was  a  truthful 
man,  and  he  felt  that  he  couldn't  sleep  in  peace 
under  a  tombstone  that  was  constantly  telling 
such  a  thumping  lie  as  that  Maria  was  resting 
in  the  same  bury  ing-lot  and  that  she  was  his 
beloved  wife,  when,  in  point  of  fact,  she  was 
another  man's  wife  and  would  be,  at  the  proper 
time,  lying  in  that  other  man's  part  of  the 
cemetery.  So  he  made  up  his  mind  to  have 
the  marble-cutter  chisel  out  Maria's  name  and 
the  date  of  her  birth.  But  before  this  was 
done  he  saw  that  it  wouldn't  be  the  square  thing 
so  far  as  Charles  Henry  and  William  Everett 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE. 


45 


were  concerned.     It  would   be  playing  it  low 
down  on  those  helpless  children  to  allow  that 


'DIDN'T  SEEM  TO  GET  ON  VERY  WELL  TOGETHER 


tombstone  to  assert  that  they  were  the  children 
of  John  Thompson  and  some  unspecified  woman 


46  TOLD   BY  THE   COLONEL. 

called  Maria,  who,  whatever  else  she  may  have 
been,  was  certainly  not  John  Thompson's  wife. 
Matters  would  not  be  improved  if  the  name  of 
Maria  were  to  be  cut  out  of  the  line  which  stated 
the  parentage  of  the  children,  for  in  that  case  it 
would  appear  that  they  had  been  independently 
developed  by  John,  without  the  intervention  of 
any  wife,  which  would  be  sure  to  give  rise  to 
gossip  and  all  sorts  of  suspicions. 

"  Of  course  the  difficulty  could  have  been  set- 
tled by  erasing  from  the  tombstone  all  reference 
to  Maria  and  her  two  children,  but  in  that  case 
a  separate  stone  for  the  children  would  some 
day  become  necessary,  and,  what  was  of  more 
consequence,  John's  grand  idea  of  a  combina- 
tion tombstone  would  have  to  be  completely 
abandoned.  John  was  not  a  hasty  man,  and 
after  thinking  the  matter  over  until  the  mental 
struggle  turned  his  hair  gray,  he  decided  to 
compromise  the  matter  by  putting  a  sort  of 
petticoat  around  the  lower  half  of  the  tomb- 
stone, which  would  hide  all  reference  to  Maria 
and  the  children.  This  was  easily  done  with 
the  aid  of  an  old  pillow-case,  and  the  tombstone 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE. 


47 


became  more  an  object  of  interest  to  the  public 
than  ever,  while  John,  so  to  speak,  sat  down 
to  wait  for  better  times. 


THK  TOMBSTONE   BECAME   MORE  AN  OBJECT  OF  INTEREST  TO  THE 
PUBLIC   THAN   EVER." 

"Now,  James  had  been  thinking  over  the 
tombstone  problem,  and  fancied  that  he  had 
found  a  solution  of  it  that  would  put  money  in 
his  own  pocket  and  at  the  same  time  satisfy 


48  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

his  brother.  He  proposed  to  John  that  the  in- 
scription should  be  altered  so  as  to  read :  'Maria, 
formerly  wife  of  John  and  afterward  of  James 
Thompson,'  and  that  a  hand  should  be  carved 
on  the  stone  with  an  index-finger  pointing 
toward  James'  lot,  and  a  line  in  small  type  say- 
ing, 'See  small  tombstone.'  James  said  that 
he  would  pay  the  cost  of  putting  up  a  small  un- 
inscribed  stone  in  his  own  lot  over  the  remains 
of  Maria — waiting,  of  course,  until  she  should 
come  to  be  remains — and  that  John  could  pay 
the  cost  of  altering  the  inscriptions  on  the  large 
stone.  The  two  brothers  discussed  this  scheme 
for  months,  each  of  them  being  secretly  satisfied 
with  it,  but  John  maintaining  that  James  should 
pay  all  the  expenses. 

"This  James  would  not  do,  for  he  reasoned 
that  unless  John  came  to  his  terms  the  combina- 
tion tombstone  would  be  of  no  good  to  anybody, 
and  that  if  he  remained  firm  John  would  come 
round  to  his  proposal  in  time. 

"  There  isn't  the  least  doubt  that  this  would 
have  been  the  end  of  the  affair,  if  it  had  not 
been  that  James  chuckled  over  it  so  much  that 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE.  49 

one  day  he  chuckled  a  fishbone  into  his  throat 
and  choked  to  death  on  the  spot.  He  was  buried 
in  his  own  lot,  with  nothing  but  a  wooden  head- 
board to  mark  the  spot.  His  widow  said  that 
if  he  had  been  anxious  to  have  a  swell  marble 
monument  he  would  have  made  provision  for  it 
in  his  lifetime,  and  as  he  had  done  nothing  of 
the  kind,  she  could  not  see  that  she  had  any 
call  to  waste  her  money  on  worldly  vanities. 

"  How  did  this  settle  the  affair  of  the  combi- 
nation tombstone?  I'm  just  telling  you.  You 
see,  by  this  time  the  world  had  not  come  to  an 
end,  and  John,  who  always  hated  people  who 
didn't  keep  their  engagements,  seeing  that  the 
Second  Adventists  didn't  keep  theirs,  left  them 
and  returned  to  the  regular  Baptist  fold.  When 
his  brother  died  he  went  to  the  funeral,  and  did 
what  little  he  could,  in  an  inexpensive  way,  to 
comfort  the  widow.  The  long  and  short  of  it 
was  that  they  became  as  friendly  as  they  ever 
had  been,  and  John  finally  proposed  that  Maria 
should  marry  him  again.  'You  know,  Maria,' 
he  said,  'that  we  never  disagreed  except  about 
that  Second  Advent  nonsense.  You  were  right 


50  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

about  that  and  I  was  wrong,  as  the  event  has 
proved,  and  now  that  we're  agreed  once  more, 
I  don't  see  as  there  is  anything  to  hinder  our 
getting  married  again. ' 

"  Maria  said  that  she  had  a  comfortable  sup- 
port, and  she  couldn't  feel  that  it  was  the  will 
of  Providence  for  her  to  be  married  so  often, 
considering  how  many  poor  women  there  were 
who  couldn't  get  a  single  husband. 

"'Well,'  continued  John,  'there  is  that  there 
tombstone.  It  always  pleased  you  and  I  was 
alwaj's  proud  of  it.  If  we  don't  get  married 
again  that  tombstone  is  as  good  as  thrown 
away,  and  it  seems  unchristian  to  throw  away 
a  matter  of  seventy- five  dollars  when  the  whole 
thing  could  be  arranged  so  easy. ' 

"The  argument  was  one  which  Maria  felt 
that  she  could  not  resist,  and  so,  after  she  had 
mourned  James  Thompson  for  a  fitting  period, 
she  married  John  a  second  time,  and  the  tomb- 
stone's reputation  for  veracity  was  restored. 
John  and  Maria  often  discussed  the  feasibility 
of  selling  James'  lot  and  burying  him  where 
the  combination  tombstone  would  take  him  in, 


THOMPSON'S  TOMBSTONE.  51 

but  there  was  no  more  room  for  fresh  inscrip- 
tions, and  besides,  John  didn't  see  his  way  clear 
to  stating  in  a  short  and  impressive  way  the 
facts  as  to  the  relationship  between  James  and 
Maria.  So,  on  the  whole,  he  judged  it  best  to  let 
James  sleep  in  his  own  lot,  and  let  the  combina- 
tion tombstone  testify  only  to  the  virtues  of 
John  Thompson  and  his  family.  That's  the 
story  of  Thompson's  tombstone,  and  if  you  don't 
believe  it  I  can  show  you  a  photograph  of  the 
stone  with  all  the  inscriptions.  I've  got  it  in 
my  trunk  at  this  very  moment,  and  when  we  go 
back  to  the  hotel,  if  you  remind  me  of  it,  I'll 
get  it  out." 


A  UNION  MEETING. 

"WELL,  sir,"  said  the  Colonel,  "since  you 
ask  me  what  struck  me  most  forcibly  during 
my  tour  of  England,  and  supposing  that  }TOU 
want  a  civil  answer  to  a  civil  question,  I  will 
say  that  the  thing  that  astonished  me  more  than 
anything  else  was  the  lack  of  religious  enter- 
prise in  England. 

"  I  have  visited  nearly  every  section  of  your 
country,  and  what  did  I  find?  Why,  sir,  in 
every  town  there  was  a  parish  church  of  the 
regulation  pattern  and  one  other  kind  of  church, 
which  was  generally  some  sort  of  Methodist  in 
its  persuasion.  Now,  in  America  there  is  hardly 
a  village  which  hasn't  half  a  dozen  different 
kinds  of  churches,  and  as  a  rule  at  least  one  of 
them  belongs  to  some  brand-new  denomination, 
one  that  has  just  been  patented  and  put  on  the 

market,  as  you  might  say.     When  I  lived  in. 
52 


A   UNION   MEETING.  53 

Middleopolis,  Iowa,  there  were  only  fifteen  hun- 
dred people  in  the  place,  but  we  had  six  kinds 
of  churches.  There  was  the  Episcopalian,  the 


"THE  LACK  OP  RELISIOUS  ENTERPRISE  IN  ENGLAND." 

Methodist,  the  Congregational,  the  Baptist,  the 
Presbyterian,  the  Unitarian,  and  the  Unleav- 
ened Disciples  church,  not  to  mention  the  col- 
ored Methodist  church,  which,  of  course,  we 
didn't  count  among  respectable  white  denomi- 


54  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

nations.  All  these  churches  were  lively  and  ag- 
gressive, and  the  Unleavened  Disciples,  that  had 
just  been  brought  out,  was  as  vigorous  as  the 
oldest  of  them.  All  of  them  were  furnishing 
good  preaching  and  good  music,  and  striving 
to  outdo  one  another  in  spreading  the  Gospel 
and  raising  the  price  of  pew-rents.  I  could  go 
for  two  or  three  months  to  the  Presbyterian 
church,  and  then  I  could  take  a  hack  at  the 
Baptists  and  pass  half  a  dozen  Sundays  with 
the  Methodists,  and  all  this  variety  would  not 
cost  me  more  than  it  would  have  cost  to  pay 
pew-rent  all  the  year  round  in  any  one  church. 
And  then,  besides  the  preaching,  there  were  the 
entertainments  that  each  church  had  to  get  up 


if  it  didn't  want  to  fall  behind  its  rivals. 
had  courses  of  lectures,  and  returned  mission- 
aries, and  ice-cream  festivals  till  you  couldn't 
rest.  Why,  although  I  am  an  old  theatrical 
manager,  I  should  not  like  to  undertake  to  run 
a  first-class  American  church  in  opposition  to 
one  run  by  some  young  preacher  who  had  been 
trained  to  the  business  and  knew  just  what  the 
popular  religious  taste  demanded.  I  never  was 


A  UNION  MEETING.  55 

mixed  up  in  church  business  but  once,  and  then 
I  found  that  I  wasn't  in  my  proper  sphere." 

The  Colonel  chuckled  slowly  to  himself,  as 
his  custom  was  when  anything  amused  him, 
and  I  asked  him  to  tell  me  his  ecclesiastical 
experience. 

"Well,  this  was  the  way  of  it,"  he  replied. 
"One  winter  the  leading  citizens  of  the  place 
decided  to  get  up  a  series  of  union  meetings. 
Perhaps  you  don't  know  what  a  union  meeting 
is?  I  thought  so.  It  bears  out  what  I  was 
saying  about  your  want  of  religious  enterprise. 
Well,  it's  a  sort  of  monster  combination,  as  we 
would  say  in  the  profession.  All  the  churches 
agree  to  hold  meetings  together,  and  all  the 
preaching  talent  of  the  whole  of  them  is  collected 
in  one  pulpit,  and  each  man  preaches  in  turn. 
Of  course  every  minister  has  his  own  backers, 
who  are  anxious  to  see  him  do  himself  and  his 
denomination  credit,  and  who  turn  out  in  full 
force  so  as  to  give  him  their  support.  The  result 
is  that  a  union  meeting  will  always  draw,  even 
in  a  town  where  no  single  church  can  get  a  full 
house,  no  matter  what  attractions  it  may  offer. 


56  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

"  Now,  a  fundamental  rule  of  a  union  meet- 
ing is  that  no  doctrines  are  to  be  preached  to 
which  any  one  could  object.  The  Baptist 
preacher  is  forbidden  to  say  anything  about 
baptism,  and  the  Methodist  can't  allude  to  fall- 
ing from  grace  in  a  union  meeting.  This  is 
supposed  to  keep  things  peaceful  and  to  avoid 
arguments  and  throwing  of  hymn-books  and 
such-like  proceedings,  which  would  otherwise 
be  inevitable. 

"The  union  meetings  had  been  in  progress 
for  three  or  four  nights  when  I  looked  into  the 
Presbyterian  church,  where  they  were  held  one 
evening,  just  to  see  how  the  thing  was  drawing. 
All  the  ministers  in  town,  except  the  Episco- 
palian minister,  were  sitting  on  the  platform 
waiting  their  cues.  The  Episcopalian  minister 
had  been  asked  to  join  in  the  services,  but  he 
had  declined,  saying  that  if  it  was  all  the  same 
to  his  dissenting  and  partially  Christian  friends 
he  would  prefer  to  play  a  lone  hand ;  and  the 
colored  minister  was  serving  out  his  time  in 
connection  with  some  of  his  neighbors'  chickens 
that,  he  said,  had  flown  into  his  kitchen  and 


A  UNION  MEETING.  57 

committed  suicide  there,  so  he  couldn't  have 
been  asked,  even  if  the  white  ministers  had  been 
willing  to  unite  with  him. 

"  The  Presbyterian  minister  was  finishing  his 
sermon  when  I  entered,  and  soon  as  he  had  re- 
tired the  Baptist  minister  got  up  and  gave  out 
a  hymn  which  was  simply  crowded  with  Bap- 
tist doctrine.  I  had  often  heard  it,  and  I  re- 
member that  first  verse,  which  ran  this  way : 

"  'I'd  rather  be  a  Baptist 

And  wear  a  smiling  face, 
Than  for  to  be  a  Methodist 
And  always  fall  from  grace. ' 

"  The  hymn  was  no  sooner  given  out  than  the 
Methodist  minister  rose  and  claimed  a  foul,  on 
the  ground  that  Baptist  doctrine  had  been  in- 
troduced into  a  union  meeting.  There  was  no 
manner  of  doubt  that  he  was  right,  but  the  Bap- 
tists in  the  congregation  sang  the  hymn  with 
such  enthusiasm  that  they  drowned  the  minis- 
ter's voice.  But  when  the  hymn  was  over  there 
was  just  a  heavenly  row.  One  Presbyterian 
deacon  actually  went  so  far  as  to  draw  on  a 
Baptist  elder,  and  there  would  have  been  blood 


58  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

shed  if  the  elder  had  not  knocked  him  down 
with  a  kerosene  lamp,  and  convinced  him  that 
drawing  pistols  in  church  was  not  the  spirit  of 
the  Gospel.  Everybody  was  talking  at  once, 
and  the  women  who  were  not  scolding  were 
crying.  The  meeting  was  beginning  to  look 
like  an  enthusiastic  political  meeting  in  Cork, 
when  I  rapped  on  the  pulpit  and  called  for 
order.  Everybody  knew  me  and  wanted  to 
hear  what  I  had  to  say,  so  the  meeting  calmed 
down,  except  near  the  door,  where  the  Metho- 
dists had  got  a  large  Baptist  jammed  into  the 
wood-box,  and  in  the  vestibule,  where  the  Uni- 
tarians had  formed  a  ring  to  see  the  Unitarian 
minister  argue  with  an  Unleavened  Disciple. 

"  I  told  the  people  that  they  were  making  a 
big  mistake  in  trying  to  run  that  sort  of  an 
entertainment  without  an  umpire.  The  idea 
pleased  them,  and  before  I  knew  what  was 
going  to  be  done  they  had  passed  a  resolution 
making  me  umpire  and  calling  on  me  to  decide 
whether  the  Baptist  hymn  constituted  a  foul. 
I  decided  that  it  did  not,  on  the  ground  that, 
according  to  the  original  agreement,  no  minis- 


A   UNION    MEETING.  59 

ter  was  to  preach  any  sectarian  doctrines,  but 
that  nothing  was  said  about  the  hymns  that 
might  be  sung.  Then  I  proposed  that  in  order 
to  prevent  any  future  disputes  and  to  promote 
brotherly  feeling,  a  new  system  of  singing 
hymns  should  be  adopted.  I  said,  as  far  as  I 
can  recollect,  that  singing  hymns  did  not  come 
under  the  head  of  incidental  music,  but  was  a 
sort  of  entr'acte  music,  intended  to  relax  and 
divert  the  audience  while  bracing  up  to  hear  the 
next  sermon.  This  being  the  case,  it  stood  to 
reason  that  hymn-singing  should  be  made  a  real 
pleasure,  and  not  an  occasion  for  hard  feeling 
and  the  general  heaving  of  books  and  foot-stools. 
'Now,'  said  I,  'that  can  be  managed  in  this 
way.  When  you  sing  let  everybody  sing  the 
same  tune,  but  each  denomination  sing  what- 
ever words  it  prefers  to  sing.  Everybody  will 
sing  his  own  doctrines,  but  nobody  will  have 
any  call  to  feel  offended. ' 

"  The  idea  was  received  with  general  enthu- 
siasm, especially  among  the  young  persons  pres- 
ent, and  the  objections  made  by  a  few  hard- 
headed  old  conservatives  were  overruled.  The 


60  TOLD  BY  THE   COLONEL. 

next  time  singing  was  in  order  the  Unitarian 
minister  selected  a  familiar  short-metre  tune, 
and  each  minister  told  his  private  flock  what 
hymn  to  sing  to  it.  Everybody  sang  at  the  top 
of  his  or  her  lungs,  and  as  nobody  ever  under- 
stands the  words  that  anybody  else  is  singing, 
there  did  not  seem  to  be  anything  strange  in 
the  singing  of  six  different  hymns  to  the  same 
tune.  There  was  a  moment  when  things  were 
a  little  strained  in  consequence  of  the  Presby- 
terians, who  were  a  strong  body,  and  had  got 
their  second  wind,  singing  a  verse  about  pre- 
destination with  such  vigor  as  partly  to  swamp 
their  rivals,  but  I  decided  that  there  was  no 
foul,  and  the  audience,  being  rather  tired  with 
their  exertions,  settled  down  to  listen  to  the  next 
sermon. 

"  The  next  time  it  was  the  Methodist  minister 
who  gave  out  the  tune,  and  he  selected  one  that 
nobody  who  was  not  born  and  bred  a  Methodist 
had  ever  heard  of.  We  used  to  sing  something 
very  much  like  it  at  the  windlass  when  I  was  a 
sailor,  and  it  had  a  regular  hurricane  chorus. 
When  the  Methodist  contingent  started  in  to 


A   UNION   MEETING.  61 

sing  their  hymn  to  this  tune,  not  a  note  could 
any  of  the  rival  denominations  raise.  They 
stood  it  in  silence  until  two  verses  had  been 

sung,  and  then 

"Well,  I  won't  undertake  to  describe  what 
followed.  After  about  five  minutes  the  Metho- 
dists didn't  feel  like  singing  any  more.  In 
fact,  most  of  them  were  outside  the  meeting- 
house limping  their  way  home,  and  remarking 
that  they  had  had  enough  of  'thish  yer  fellow- 
ship with  other  churches'  to  last  them  for  the 
rest  of  their  lives.  Inside  the  meeting-house 
the  triumphant  majority  were  passing  resolu- 
tions calling  me  a  depraved  worldling,  who,  at 
the  instigation  of  the  devil,  had  tried  to  convert 
a  religious  assemblage  into  an  Orange  riot. 
Even  the  Unitarians,  who  always  maintained 
that  they  did  not  believe  in  the  devil,  voted  for 
the  resolutions,  and  three  of  them  were  appointed 
on  the  committee  charged  with  putting  me  out. 
I  didn't  stay  to  hear  any  more  sermons,  but  I 
afterward  understood  that  all  the  ministers 
preached  at  me,  and  that  the  amount  of  union 
displayed  in  putting  the  blame  of  everything  on 


62  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

my  shoulders  was  so  touching  that  men  who 
had  been  enemies  for  years  shook  hands  and 
called  one  another  brothers. 

"  Yes !  we  are  an  enterprising  people  in  eccle- 
siastical matters,  and  I  calculate  that  it  will  be 
a  long  time  before  an  English  village  will  see  a 
first-class  union  meeting." 


A  CLERICAL  ROMANCE. 

"  IF  you  want  to  know  my  opinion  of  women- 
preachers,"  said  the  Colonel,  "I  can  give  it  to 
you  straight.  They  draw  well  at  first,  but  you 
can't  depend  upon  them  for  a  run.  I  have  had 
considerable  experience  of  them,  and  at  one  time 
I  thought  well  of  them,  but  a  woman,  I  think,  is 
out  of  place  in  the  pulpit. 

"  Although  I  never  was  a  full  member  of  the 
New  Berlinopolisville  Methodist  church,  I  was 
treated  as  a  sort  of  honorary  member,  partly 
because  I  subscribed  pretty  largely  to  the  pas- 
tor's salary,  the  annual  picnics,  and  that  sort 
of  thing,  and  partly  because  the  deacons,  know- 
ing that  I  had  some  little  reputation  as  a  theat- 
rical manager  and  was  a  man  of  from  fair  to 
middling  judgment,  used  to  consult  me  quietly 
about  the  management  of  the  church.  There 

was  a  large  Baptist  church  in  the  same  town, 
63 


64  TOLD   BY  THE   COLONEL. 

and  its  opposition  was  a  little  too  much  for  us. 
The  Baptist  house  was  crowded  every  Sunday, 
while  ours  was  thin  and  discouraging.  We  had 
a  good  old  gentleman  for  a  minister,  but  he  was 
over  seventy,  and  a  married  man  besides,  which 
kept  the  women  from  taking  much  interest  in 
him ;  while  his  old-fashioned  notions  didn't  suit 
the  young  men  of  the  congregation.  The  Bap- 
tists, on  the  other  hand,  had  a  young  unmarried 
preacher,  with  a  voice  that  you  could  hear  a 
quarter  of  a  mile  off,  and  a  way  of  giving  it  to 
the  Jews,  and  the  Mormons,  and  other  safe  and 
distant  sinners  that  filled  his  hearers  with  en- 
thusiasm and  offended  nobody.  It  was  grow- 
ing more  and  more  evident  every  day  that  our 
establishment  was  going  behindhand,  and  that 
something  must  be  done  unless  we  were  willing 
to  close  our  doors  and  go  into  bankruptcy ;  so 
one  day  the  whole  board  of  trustees  and  all  the 
deacons  came  round  to  talk  the  matter  over 
with  me. 

"  My  mind  was  already  made  up,  and  I  was 
only  waiting  to  have  my  advice  asked  before 
giving  it.  'What  we  want,'  said  I,  'is  a  wo- 


A   CLERICAL   ROMANCE.  65 

man-preacher.  She'll  be  a  sensation  that  will 
take  the  wind  out  of  that  Baptist  windmill,  and 
if  she  is  good-looking,  which  she  has  got  to  be, 
I  will  bet  you — that  is,  I  am  prepared  to  say — 
that  within  a  fortnight  there  will  be  standing- 
room  only  in  the  old  Methodist  church.' 

"  'But  what  are  we  to  do  with  Dr.  Brewster?' 
asked  one  of  the  deacons.  l  He  has  been  preach- 
ing to  us  now  for  forty  years,  and  it  don't  seem 
quite  the  square  thing  to  turn  him  adrift. ' 

" '  Oh !  that's  all  right, '  said  I.  '  We'll  retire 
him  on  a  pension,  and  he'll  be  glad  enough  to 
take  it.  As  for  your  woman-preacher,  I've  got 
just  what  you  want.  At  least,  I  know  where 
she  is  and  how  much  we'll  have  to  pay  to  get 
her.  She'll  come  fast  enough  for  the  same 
salary  that  we  are  paying  Dr.  Brewster,  and 
if  she  doesn't  double  the  value  of  your  pew- 
rents  in  six  months,  I  will  make  up  the  deficit 
myself. ' 

"  The  trustees  were  willing  to  take  my  advice, 
and  in  the  course  of  a  few  days  Dr.  Brewster 
had  been  retired  on  half-pay,  the  church  had 
extended  a  call  to  the  Rev.  Matilda  Marsh,  and 


6G  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

the  reverend  girl,  finding  that  the  salary  was 
satisfactory,  accepted  it. 

"She  was  only  about  twenty-five  years  old, 
and  as  pretty  as  a  picture  when  she  stood  in 
the  pulpit  in  her  black  silk  dress  with  a  nar- 
row white  collar,  something  like  the  sort  of 
thing  that  your  clergymen  wear.  I  couldn't 
help  feeling  sad,  when  I  first  saw  her,  to  think 
that  she  did  not  go  into  the  variety  business  or 
a  circus,  where  she  would  have  made  her  for- 
tune and  the  fortune  of  any  intelligent  manager. 
As  a  dance-and-song  artiste  she  would  have 
been  worth  a  good  six  hundred  dollars  a  week. 
But  women  are  always  wasting  their  talents, 
when  they  have  any,  and  doing  exactly  what 
Nature  didn't  mean  them  to  do. 

"  Miss  Marsh  was  a  success  from  the  moment 
that  she  came  among  us.  Being  both  unmarried 
and  pretty,  she  naturally  fetched  the  young  men, 
and  as  she  let  it  be  understood  that  she  believed 
in  the  celibacy  of  the  clergy  and  never  intended 
to  marry  under  any  circumstances,  the  greater 
part  of  the  women  were  willing  to  forgive  her 
good  looks.  Then  she  could  preach  a  first-class. 


•*THE   REV.    MATILDA   MARSH. 


67 


68  TOLD    BY   THE    COLONEL. 

sermon,  and  I  call  myself  a  judge  of  sermons, 
for  at  one  time  I  managed  an  agency  for  sup- 
plying preachers  with  ready-made  sermons,  and 
I  never  put  a  single  one  on  the  market  that  I 
hadn't  read  myself.  I  don't  mean  to  say  that 
Miss  Marsh  was  strong  on  doctrinal  sermons, 
but  every  one  knows  that  the  public  doesn't  want 
doctrinal  sermons.  What  it  wants  is  poetry 
and  pathos,  and  Miss  Marsh  used  to  ladle  them 
out  as  if  she  had  been  born  and  bred  an  under- 
taker's poet. 

"  As  I  had  prophesied,  the  Baptists  couldn't 
stand  the  competition  when  we  opened  with  our 
woman-preacher.  Their  minister  took  to  going 
to  the  gymnasium  to  expand  his  chest,  and  by 
that  means  increased  his  lung-power  until  he 
could  be  heard  almost  twice  as  far  as  formerly, 
but  it  didn't  do  any  good.  His  congregation 
thinned  out  week  by  week,  and  while  our  church 
was  crowded,  his  pew-rents  fell  below  what  was 
necessary  to  pay  his  salary,  not  to  speak  of  the 
other  incidental  expenses.  A  few  of  the  young 
men  continued  to  stick  by  him  until  our  minis- 
ter began  her  series  of  sermons  'To  Young  Men 


A   CLERICAL   ROMANCE.  69 

Only,'  and  that  brought  them  in.  I  had  the 
sermons  advertised  with  big  colored  posters,  and 
they  proved  to  be  the  most  attractive  thing  ever 
offered  to  the  religious  public.  The  church  was 
crammed  with  young  men,  while  lots  of  men  of 
from  fifty  to  seventy  years  old  joined  the  Young 
Men's  Christian  Association  as  soon  as  they 
heard  of  the  course  of  sermons,  and  by  that 
means  managed  to  get  admission  to  hear  them. 
Miss  Marsh  preached  to  young  men  on  the  vices 
of  the  day,  such  as  drinking,  and  card-playing, 
and  dancing,  and  going  to  the  theatre,  and  she 
urged  them  to  give  up  these  dissipations  and 
cultivate  their  minds.  Some  of  them  started  a 
Browning  Club  that  for  a  time  was  very  popu- 
lar. Every  time  the  club  met  one  of  Brown- 
ing's poems  would  be  selected  by  the  president, 
and  each  member  who  put  up  a  dollar  was  al- 
lowed to  guess  its  meaning.  The  man  who 
made  the  best  guess  took  all  the  money,  and 
sometimes  there  was  as  much  as  thirty  dollars 
in  the  pool.  The  young  men  told  Miss  Marsh 
that  they  had  given  up  poker  and  gone  in  for 
Browning,  and  of  course  she  was  greatly 


70  TOLD    BY    THE   COLONEL. 

pleased.  Then  some  of  the  older  men  started  a 
Milton  Club,  and  used  to  cut  for  drinks  by  put- 
ting a  knife-blade  into  'Paradise  Lost' — the 
man  who  made  it  open  at  a  page  the  first  letter 
of  which  was  nearer  to  the  head  of  the  alphabet 
than  any  letter  cut  by  any  other  man  winning 
the  game.  Under  Miss  Marsh's  influence  a  good 
many  other  schemes  for  mental  cultivation  were 
invented  and  put  into  operation,  and  everybody 
said  that  that  noble  young  woman  was  doing 
an  incalculable  amount  of  good. 

"  As  a  matter  of  course,  at  least  half  the  j*oung 
men  of  the  congregation  fell  in  love  with  the 
girl-preacher.  They  found  it  very  difficult  to 
make  any  progress  in  courting  her,  for  she 
wouldn't  listen  to  any  conversation  on  the  sub- 
ject. When  Christmas  came,  the  question  what 
to  give  her  kept  the  young  men  awake  night 
after  night.  The  women  had  an  easy  job,  for 
they  could  give  the  preacher  clothes,  and  lace, 
and  hairpins,  and  such,  which  the  young  men 
knew  that  they  could  not  give  without  taking  a 
liberty.  If  she  had  been  a  man,  slippers  would, 
of  course,  have  been  the  correct  thing,  but  the 


A   CLERICAL   ROMANCE.  71 

young  men  felt  that  they  couldn't  work  slippers 
for  a  girl  that  always  wore  buttoned  boots,  and 
that  if  they  did  venture  upon  such  a  thing  the 
chances  were  that  she  would  feel  herself  in- 
sulted. One  chap  thought  of  working  on  the 
front  of  an  underskirt — if  that  is  the  right  name 
of  it — I  mean  one  of  those  petticoats  that  are 
built  for  show  rather  than  use — the  words, 
'Bless  our  Pastor,'  in  yellow  floss  silk,  but  when 
he  asked  his  sister  to  lend  him  one  of  her  skirts 
as  a  model,  she  told  him  that  he  was  the  cham- 
pion fool  of  the  country.  You  may  ask,  why 
didn't  the  preacher's  admirers  give  her  jew- 
elry? For  the  reason  that  she  never  wore  any- 
thing of  the  kind  except  a  pair  of  ear-rings  that 
her  mother  had  given  her,  and  which  she  had 
promised  always  to  wear.  They  represented 
chestnut-burs,  and  it  is  clear  to  my  mind  that 
her  mother  knew  that  no  young  man  who  had 
much  regard  for  his  eyesight  would  come  very 
near  a  girl  defended  by  that  sort  of  ear-ring. 
Miss  Marsh  used  to  say  that  other  people  could 
wear  what  they  thought  right,  but  she  felt  it  to 
be  inconsistent  with  her  holy  calling  to  wear 


7£  TOLD   BV   THE   COLONEL. 

any  jewelry  except  the  ear-rings  that  her  sainted 
mother  had  given  her. 

"  The  best  running  was  undoubtedly  made  by 
the  cashier  of  the  savings  bank  and  a  young 
lawyer.  Not  that  either  of  them  had  any  real 
encouragement  from  Miss  Marsh,  but  she  cer- 
tainly preferred  them  to  the  rest  of  the  field,  and 
was  on  what  was  certainly  entitled  to  be  called 
friendly  terms  with  both  of  them.  Of  the  two 
the  cashier  was  by  far  the  most  devoted.  He 
was  ready  to  do  anything  that  might  give  him 
a  chance  of  winning.  He  even  wanted  to  take 
a  class  in  the  Sunday-school,  but  the  bank  di- 
rectors forbade  it.  They  said  it  would  impair 
the  confidence  of  the  public  in  the  bank,  and 
would  be  pretty  sure  to  bring  about  a  run  which 
the  bank  might  not  be  able  to  stand.  They  con- 
sented, however,  that  he  should  become  the 
president  of  the  new  temperance  society  which 
the  Rev.  Miss  Marsh  had  started,  as  the  presi- 
dent had  the  right  to  buy  wines  and  liquors  at 
wholesale  in  order  to  have  them  analyzed,  and 
thus  show  how  poisonous  they  were.  As  the 
cashier  offered  to  stand  in  with  the  bank  direc- 


A   CLERICAL   ROMANCE.  73 

tors  and  let  them  fill  their  cellars  at  wholesale 
rates,  both  he  and  the  directors  made  a  good 
thing  of  it. 

"  The  other  young  man,  the  lawyer,  was  a 
different  sort  of  chap.  He  was  one  of  those 
fellows  that  begin  to  court  a  girl  by  knocking 
her  down  with  a  club.  I  don't  mean  to  say 
that  he  ever  actually  knocked  a  woman  down, 
but  his  manner  toward  women  was  that  of  a  su- 
perior being,  instead  of  a  slave,  and  I  am  bound 
to  say  that  as  a  general  thing  the  women  seemed 
to  like  it.  He  wasn't  a  handsome  man,  like  the 
cashier,  but  he  had  a  big  yellow  beard  that  any 
sensible  girl  would  have  held  to  be  worth  twice 
the  smooth-shaved  cheek  of  his  rival.  He  never 
tried  to  join  the  Sunday-school  or  the  temper- 
ance society,  or  do  anything  else  of  the  kind 
to  curry  favor  with  the  minister ;  but  he  used 
occasionally  to  give  her  good  advice,  and  to  tell 
her  that  this  or  that  thing  which  she  was  doing 
was  a  mistake.  Indeed,  he  didn't  hesitate  to 
tell  her  that  she  had  no  business  in  the  pulpit, 
and  had  better  go  out  as  a  governess  or  a  circus 
rider,  and  so  conform  to  the  dictates  of  Nature. 


74 


TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 


"  I  used  to  watch  the  game  pretty  closely,  be- 
cause I  had  staked  my  professional  reputation 
on  the  financial  success  of  the  girl-preacher,  and 


I  didn't  want  her  to  marry  and  so  put  an  end 
to  her  attractiveness  with  the  general  public. 
I  didn't  realh'  think  that  there  was  much  danger 
of  any  such  thing,  for  Miss  Marsh  seemed  to  be 


A   CLERICAL   ROMANCE.  75 

entirely  absorbed  in  her  work,  and  her  salary 
was  exceptionally  large.  Still,  you  can  never 
tell  when  a  woman  will  break  the  very  best  en- 
gagement, and  that  is  one  reason  why  they  will 
never  succeed  as  preachers.  You  pay  a  man  a 
good  salary,  and  he  will  never  find  that  Provi- 
dence calls  him  elsewhere,  unless,  of  course,  he 
has  a  very  much  better  offer;  but  a  woman- 
preacher  is  capable  of  throwing  up  a  first-class 
salary  because  she  don't  like  the  color  of  a  dea- 
con's hair,  or  because  the  upholstery  of  the  pul- 
pit doesn't  match  with  her  complexion. 

"That  winter  we  had  a  very  heavy  fall  of 
snow,  and  after  that  the  sleighing  was  magnifi- 
cent for  the  next  month  or  two.  The  cashier 
made  the  most  of  it  by  taking  the  minister  out 
sleigh-riding  two  or  three  times  a  week.  The 
lawyer  did  not  seem  to  care  anything  about  it, 
even  when  he  saw  the  minister  whirling  along 
the  road  behind  the  best  pair  of  horses  in  the 
town,  with  the  cashier  by  her  side  and  her  lap 
full  of  caramels.  But  one  Saturday  afternoon, 
when  he  knew  that  the  cashier  would  be  de- 
tained at  the  bank  until  very  late — the  president 


?6  TOLD   fiY   THEi   COLONEL. 

having  just  skipped  to  Canada,  and  it  being 
necessary  to  ascertain  the  amount  of  the  deficit 
without  delay — the  lawyer  hired  a  sleigh  and 
called  for  the  minister.  Although  she  was  pre- 
paring her  next  day's  sermon  by  committing  to 
memory  a  lot  of  Shelley's  poetry,  she  dropped 
Shelley  and  had  on  her  best  hat  and  was 
wrapped  in  the  buffalo  robe  by  the  side  of  the 
lawyer  in  less  than  half  an  hour  after  she  had 
told  him  that  she  positively  wouldn't  keep  him 
waiting  three  minutes. 

"  You  remember  what  I  said  about  the  pecu- 
liar pattern  of  her  ear-rings.  It  is  through  those 
ear-rings  that  the  Methodist  church  lost  its  min- 
ister, and  I  became  convinced  that  a  female 
ministry  is  not  a  good  thing  to  tie  to.  Miss 
Marsh  and  her  admirer  were  driving  quietly 
along  and  enjoying  themselves  in  a  perfectly 
respectable  way,  when  one  runner  of  the  sleigh 
went  over  a  good-sized  log  that  had  dropped 
from  somebody's  load  of  wood  and  had  been 
left  in  the  road.  The  sleigh  didn't  quite  upset, 
but  Miss  Marsh  was  thrown  against  the  lawyer 
with  a  shock  for  which  she  apologized,  and  he 


78  TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL. 

thanked  her.  But  it  happened  that  one  of  her 
ear-rings  caught  in  the  lawyer's  beard,  and  was 
so  twisted  up  with  it  that  it  was  impossible  to 
disentangle  it.  Unless  Miss  Marsh  was  ready 
to  drag  about  half  her  companion's  beard  out 
by  the  roots,  there  was  nothing  to  be  done  ex- 
cept for  her  to  sit  with  her  cheek  close  against 
his  until  some  third  person  could  manage  to 
disentangle  the  ear-ring.  While  she  was  in 
this  painful  position — at  least  she  said  at  the 
time  that  it  was  painful — a  sleigh  containing 
two  of  her  deacons  and  a  prominent  Baptist 
drove  by.  Miss  Marsh  saw  them  and  saw  the 
horrified  expression  on  their  faces.  She  knew 
quick  enough  that  her  usefulness  as  a  minister 
in  New  Berlinopolisville  was  at  an  end  and  that 
there  was  going  to  be  a  terrible  scandal.  So, 
being  a  woman,  she  burst  into  tears  and  said 
that  she  wished  she  were  dead. 

"  But  the  lawyer  was  equal  to  the  occasion. 
He  told  her  that  there  was  nothing  left  to  be 
done  except  for  them  to  be  married  and  dis- 
entangled at  the  next  town.  Then  he  would 
take  her  on  a  long  wedding-trip,  stopping  at 


A   CLERICAL   ROMANCE.  79 

Chicago  to  buy  some  clothes,  and  that  if  she  so 
wished  they  would  afterward  settle  in  some 
other  town,  instead  of  coming  back  to  New 
Berlinopolisville.  Of  course  she  said  that  the 
proposal  was  not  to  be  thought  of  for  a  moment, 
and  of  course  she  accepted  it  within  the  next 
ten  minutes.  They  drove  to  the  house  of  the 
nearest  minister,  and  the  minister's  wife  dis- 
entangled them,  to  save  time,  while  the  minister 
was  engaged  in  marrying  them. 

"  That  was  the  end  of  the  experiment  of  play- 
ing a  woman-preacher  on  the  boards  of  the 
First  Methodist  Church  of  Berlinopolisville. 
Everybody  was  content"  to  call  a  man  in  the 
place  of  Miss  Marsh,  and  everybody  agreed  to 
blame  me  for  the  failure  of  the  experiment.  I 
don't  know  whether  the  lawyer  ever  had  any 
reason  to  regret  his  marriage  or  not,  but  when 
I  saw  his  wife  at  a  fancy  dress  ball  at  Chicago, 
a  year  or  two  later,  I  could  see  that  she  was  not 
sorry  that  she  had  given  up  the  ministry.  Ever 
since  that  time  I  have  been  opposed  to  women- 
preachers,  and  consider  a  woman  in  the  pulpit 
as  much  out  of  place  as  a  deacon  in  the  ballet." 


A  MYSTERY. 

"Do  I  believe  in  spiritualism?"  repeated  the 
Colonel.  "Well,  you  wouldn't  ask  me  that 
question  if  you  knew  that  I  had  been  in  the 
business  myself.  I  once  ran  a  'Grand  Spiritual 
Combination  Show.'  I  had  three  first-class 
mediums,  who  did  everything,  from  knocking 
on  a  table  to  materializing  Napoleon,  or  Wash- 
ington, or  any  of  your- dead  friends.  It  was  a 
good  business  while  it  lasted,  but,  unfortunately, 
we  showed  one  night  in  a  Texas  town  before  a 
lot  of  cowboys.  One  of  them  brought  his  lasso 
under  his  coat,  and  when  the  ghost  of  William 
Penn  appeared  the  cowboy  lassoed  him  and 
hauled  him  in,  hand  over  hand,  for  further  in- 
vestigation. The  language  William  Penn  used 
drove  all  the  ladies  out  of  the  place,  and  his 
want  of  judgment  in  tackling  the  cowboy  cost 

him  all  his  front  teeth.     I  and  the  other  me- 
80 


A   MYSTERY.  81 

diums  and  the  doorkeeper  had  to  take  a  hand 
in  the  manifestation,  and  the  result  was  that  the 
whole  Combination  was  locked  up  over-night, 
and  the  fines  that  we  had  to  pay  made  me  tired 
of  spiritualism. 

"No,  sir!  I  don't  believe  in  spiritualism, 
but  for  all  that  there  are  curious  things  in  the 
world.  Why  is  it  that  if  a  man's  name  is 
Charles  G.  Haseltine  he  will  lose  his  right  leg 
in  a  railway  accident?  The  police  some  years 
ago  wanted  a  Charles  G.  Haseltine  with  a 
wooden  right  leg  in  the  State  of  Massachusetts, 
and  they  found  no  less  than  five  Charles  G. 
Haseltines,  and  every  one  of  them  had  lost  his 
right  leg  in  a  railway  accident.  What  makes 
it  all  the  more  curious  is  that  they  were  no  rela- 
tion to  one  another,  and  not  one  of  them  had 
ever  heard  of  the  existence  of  the  others.  Then, 
will  some  one  tell  me  what  is  the  connection  be- 
tween darkies  and  chickens?  I  say  'darkies' 
instead  of  'niggers'  because  I  had  a  colored 
regiment  on  my  right  flank  at  the  battle  of 
Corinth,  and  that  night  I  swore  I  would  never 
say  'nigger  '  again.  However,  that  don't  con.- 


82  TOLD   BY    THE   COLONEL. 

cern  you.  What  I  meant  to  say  was  that  there 
is  a  connection  between  darkies  and  chickens 
which  nobody  has  ever  yet  explained.  Of  course 
no  darky  can  resist  the  temptation  to  steal  a 
chicken.  Everybody  knows  that.  Why,  I 
knew  a  colored  minister  who  was  as  honest  a 
man  as  the  sun  ever  tried  to  tan — and  failed — 
and  I  have  known  him  to  preach  a  sermon  with  a 
chicken  that  he  had  lifted  on  his  way  to  meeting 
shoved  up  under  his  vest.  He  wouldn't  have 
stolen  a  dollar  bill  if  he  was  starving,  but  he 
would  steal  every  chicken  that  he  could  lay  his 
hands  on,  no  matter  if  his  own  chicken-house 
was  crowded  with  chickens.  It's  in  the  blood 
— or  the  skin — and  no  darky  can  help  it. 

"  What  was  I  going  to  say  about  the  connec- 
tion between  darkies  and  chickens?  I  had  very 
nearly  forgotten  it.  This  was  what  I  was  re- 
ferring to.  A  chicken  will  draw  a  darky  just 
as  a  dead  sheep  will  draw  vultures  in  Egypt, 
though  there  may  have  been  no  vultures  within 
twenty  miles  when  the  sheep  was  killed.  You 
may  be  living  in  a  town  where  there  isn't  a 
single  darky  within  ten  miles,  but  if  you  put 


A   MYSTERY. 


83 


up  a  chicken-house  and  stock  it  there  will  be 
darkies  in  the  town  within  twenty-four  hours, 
and  just  so  long  as  your  chicken-house  has  a 


PREACH  A  SERMON  \VTTH  A  CHICKEN   UNDER   HIS  VEST. 

chicken  in  it  fresh  darkies  will  continue  to 
arrive  from  all  sections  of  the  country.  This 
beats  any  trick  that  I  ever  saw  a  spiritual 
medium  perform,  and  I  can't  see  the  explanation 


84  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

of  it.  You  may  say  that  some  one  carries  word 
to  the  darkies  that  there  is  a  new  chicken-house 
waiting  to  be  visited,  but  the  answer  to  this  is 
that  it  isn't  true.  My  own  idea  is  that  it  is 
a  matter  of  instinct.  When  you  carry  a  cat 
twenty  miles  away  from  home  in  a  bag  and  let 
her  out,  we  all  know  that  her  instinct  will  show 
her  the  way  home  again  before  you  can  get 
there  yourself.  Just  in  the  same  way  instinct 
will  draw  a  darky  to  a  chicken-house  he  has 
never  seen  or  heard  of.  You'll  say  that  to  talk 
about  instinct  doesn't  explain  the  matter.  That 
is  true  enough,  but  it  makes  you  feel  as  if  you 
had  struck  the  trail,  which  is  some  satisfaction 
at  any  rate.  So  far  as  I  can  see,  that  is  about 
all  that  scientific  theories  ever  do. 

"  If  you  care  to  listen,  I'll  tell  you  what  hap- 
pened within  my  knowledge  in  connection  with 
darkies  and  chickens.  I  was  located  a  little 
after  the  war  in  the  town  of  South  Constanti- 
nople, in  the  western  part  of  Illinois,  and  my 
next-door  neighbor  was  Colonel  Ephraim  J. 
Hickox,  who  commanded  the  95th  Rhode  Island 
Regiment.  The  town  was  a  growing  place,  and 


A   MYSTERY.  85 

it  had  the  peculiarity  that  there  wasn't  a  darky 
in  it.  The  nearest  one  lived  over  at  West 
Damascus,  seven  miles  away,  and  there  was 
only  two  of  him — he  and  his  wife.  Another 
curious  thing  about  the  place  was  the  scarcity 
of  labor.  There  weren't  above  a  dozen  Irish- 
men in  the  place,  and  they  wouldn't  touch  a 
spade  or  a  hoe  under  three  dollars  a  day,  and 
wouldn't  work  more  than  four  days  in  a  week. 
You  see,  a  certain  amount  of  digging  and  gar- 
dening had  to  be  done,  and  there  wasn't  any- 
body to  do  it  except  these  Irishmen,  so  they 
naturally  made  a  good  thing  of  it,  working  half 
the  time  and  holding  meetings  for  the  redemp- 
tion of  Ireland  the  rest  of  the  time  in  the  bar- 
room of  the  International  Hotel. 

"  One  day  Colonel  Ephraim,  as  I  always  used 
to  call  him,  wanted  to  drain  his  pasture  lot,  and 
he  hired  the  Irishmen  to  dig  a  ditch  about  a 
quarter  of  a  mile  long.  They  would  dig  for  a 
day,  and  then  they  would  knock  off  and  attend 
to  suffering  Ireland,  till  Ephraim,  who  was  a 
quick-tempered  man,  was  kept  in  a  chronic  state 
of  rage.  He  had  no  notion  of  going  into  poll- 


86  TOLD    BY    THE   COLONEL. 

tics,  so  he  didn't  oare  a  straw  what  the  Irish- 
men thought  of  him,  and  used  to  talk  to  them 
as  free  as  if  they  couldn't  vote.  Why,  he 
actually  refused  to  subscribe  to  a  dynamite 
fund  and  for  a  gold  crown  to  be  presented  to 
Mr.  Gladstone,  and  you  can  judge  how  popular 
he  was  in  Irish  circles.  I  used  to  go  down  to 
Ephraim's  pasture  every  once  in  a  while  to  see 
how  his  ditch  was  getting  along,  and  one  after- 
noon I  found  the  whole  lot  of  Irishmen  lying  on 
the  grass  smoking  instead  of  working,  and 
Ephraim  in  the  very  act  of  discharging  them. 

"  'Perhaps  it's  "  nagurs"  that  you'd  be  prefer- 
ring, '  said  one  of  the  men,  as  they  picked  them- 
selves up  and  made  ready  to  leave. 

"'You  bet  it  is,'  said  Ephraim,  'and,  what's 
more,  I'll  have  that  ditch  finished  by  darkies 
before  the  week  is  out. '  This  seemed  to  amuse 
the  Irishmen,  for  they  went  away  in  good  spirits, 
in  spite  of  the  language  that  had  been  hove  at 
them,  and  it  amused  me  too,  for  I  knew  that 
there  were  no  darkies  to  be  had,  no  matter  what 
wages  a  man  might  be  willing  to  pay.  I  said 
as  much  to  Ephraim,  who,  instead  of  taking  it 


A   MYSTERY.  87 

kindly,  grew  madder  than  ever,  and  said, 
'Colonel!  I'll  bet  you  fifty  dollars  that  I'll  have 
that  ditch  finished  by  darkies  inside  of  four 
days,  and  that  they'll  do  all  the  digging  with- 
out charging  me  a  dollar. ' 

"  'If  you're  going  to  send  over  into  Kentucky 
and  import  negro  labor,'  said  I,  'you  can  do  it, 
and  get  your  ditch  dug,  but  you'll  have  to  pay 
either  the  darkies  or  the  contractor  who  fur- 
nishes them.' 

"'I  promise  you  not  to  pay  a  dollar  to  any- 
body, contractor  or  nigger.  And  I  won't  ask 
anybody  to  send  me  a  single  man.  What  I'm 
betting  on  is  that  the  darkies  will  come  to  my 
place  of  their  own  accord  and  work  for  nothing. 
Are  you  going  to  take  the  bet  or  ain't  you?' 

"  I  didn't  hesitate  any  longer,  but  I  took  the 
bet,  thinking  that  Ephraim's  mind  was  failing, 
and  that  it  was  a  Christian  duty  in  his  friends 
to  see  that  if  he  did  fool  away  his  money,  it 
should  go  into  their  pockets  instead  of  the 
pockets  of  outsiders.  But,  as  you  will  see, 
Ephraim  didn't  lose  that  fifty  dollars. 

"Early  the  next  morning  Ephraim   had  a 


88  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

couple  of  masons  employed  in  turning  his  brick 
smoke-house  into  a  chicken-house,  and  he  had 
two  dozen  chickens  with  their  legs  tied  lying  on 
the  grass  waiting  for  the  chicken-house  to  be 
finished.  The  masons  broke  a  hole  through  the 
side  of  the  house  and  lined  it  with  steel  rods 
about  four  feet  long,  which  Ephraim  had 
bought  to  use  in  some  experiments  in  gun- 
making  that  he  was  always  working  at.  The 
rods  were  set  in  a  circle  which  was  about  a  foot 
and  a  half  wide  at  one  end  and  tapered  to  about 
four  inches  at  the  other  end.  The  arrangement 
was  just  like  the  wire  entrance  to  a  mouse-trap, 
of  the  sort  that  is  meant  to  catch  mice  alive  and 
never  does  it.  It  was  nothing  less  than  a 
darky-trap,  although  Ephraim  pretended  that 
it  was  a  combined  ventilator  and  front  door  for 
the  chickens.  The  masons,  so  far  as  I  could 
judge,  thought  that  Ephraim's  mind  was  going 
fast,  and  I  made  up  my  mind  that  it  would  be  a 
sin  to  let  the  man  bet  with  anybody  who  would 
be  disposed  to  take  advantage  of  his  infirmity. 

"The    trap  was   finished   before    dark,  and 
baited  with  two  dozen  young  chickens.     I  came 


A   MYSTERY. 


89 


by  the  place  a  second  time  about  sunset,  just  as 
Ephraim  was  locking  up  his  chicken-house,  and 
I  saw  a  small  darky  boy  leaning  on  the  fence. 
I  asked  him 
where  he  came 
from,  but  he 
only  said  'Dun- 
no.  '  I  found 
out  afterward 
that  he  came 
from  a  house  at 
least  ten  miles 
awajr,  and  that 
those  two  dozen 
chickens  had 
drawn  him 
there  wasn't  a 
shadow  of  doubt 
in  my  mind. 
At  the  time, 

however,  I  was  a  little  afraid  that  Ephraim 
had  begun  to  import  colored  labor,  and  that 
there  was  some  trick  about  his  bet  that  might 
prove  that  his  mind  was  all  right.  Two  days 


' ' DUNNO ! 


90  TOLD   BY  THE   COLONEL. 

afterward  I  went  down  to  the  pasture  and 
found  sixteen  darkies  digging  away  at  that 
ditch  and  Ephraim  superintending  with  a 
twenty -five-cent  cigar  in  his  mouth.  'Come  to 
pay  that  fifty  dollars,  I  suppose !'  he  said  when 
he  saw  me.  'You  can  wait  till  the  ditch  is 
finished,  which  will  be  some  time  to-day.  You 
see  I  was  as  good  as  my  word. ' 

"  I  asked  him  to  explain  how  he  had  collected 
his  darkies,  and  being  in  unusually  good  spirits 
he  told  me  about  it. 

"  He  had  made  his  trap  just  large  enough  to 
admit  a  good-sized  darky,  who  could  push  the 
steel  rods  apart  as  he  crawled  in.  but  who 
couldn't  crawl  out  again,  no  matter  how  hard 
he  might  try.  The  morning  after  he  had  set 
the  trap  Ephraim  took  his  shot-gun  and  went 
down  to  his  chicken-house.  He  found  that  the 
night's  catch  had  been  larger  than  he  had  hoped. 
There  were  sixteen  colored  men  of  different 
sizes  sitting  on  the  ground  or  leaning  up  against 
the  side  of  the  house.  There  was  a  good  deal 
of  wool  and  cloth  sticking  to  the  ends  of  the 
steel  rods,  and  some  of  the  younger  darkies 


A   MYSTERY.  91 

looked  as  if  they  had  been  fighting  with  wild- 
cats, but  they  didn't  try  to  explain  things.  Be- 
sides the  darkies,  there  were  two  white  tramps 
in  the  trap,  but  Ephraim  just  kicked  them  into 
the  streets  without  even  proposing  work  to 
them.  Then  he  came  back  and  told  the  darkies 
that  the  legislature  had  just  passed  a  bill  mak- 
ing it  felony  to  break  into  a  chicken-house,  and 
that  he  was  very  much  afraid  that  the*y  would 
be  hung  and  dissected,  unless  they  could  show 
him  some  reason  for  being  merciful  to  them. 

"  The  darkies  were  frightened,  besides  being 
hungry  and  cold,  and  when  Ephraim  said  that 
he  had  a  job  of  ditching  to  be  done,  and  that  if 
they  would  do  it  for  him  he  would  let  them  off 
scot-free,  they  were  delighted,  and  the  whole 
chicken-house  was  lit  up  with  their  teeth.  They 
went  into  that  ditch  a  happy  and  contented 
gang  and  finished  it  before  night.  Ephraim 
was  a  liberal  man,  and  considering  that  he  had 
won  fifty  dollars  and  had  got  his  ditch  finished 
for  nothing,  he  was  disposed  to  be  generous. 
So  he  gave  the  darkies  a  lot  of  good  advice  and 
informed  them  that,  with  a  view  of  remov- 


92  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

ing  temptation  from  their  way,  he  should  sell 
his  chickens  and  go  out  of  the  business.  The 
darkies  went  away  as  happy  as  if  they  had  been 
well  paid,  and  the  next  morning  there  wasn't  a 
darky  in  the  whole  town.  They  had  gone  back 
to  their  homes,  or  else  they  had  been  drawn 
somewhere  else  by  other  chickens. 

"Do  I  mean  to  say  that  Ephraim  had  not 
made  arrangements  with  some  one  to  send  him 
those  sixteen  darkies?  That  is  just  what  I  do 
mean  to  say.  When  he  fitted  up  his  chicken- 
house  he  had  no  more  idea  where  his  darkies 
would  come  from  than  I  had,  but  he  knew  that 
the  chickens  would  draw  darkies  and  that  his 
trap  would  hold  them,  so  he  felt  that  he  had  a 
sure  thing.  I  have  no  more  doubt  that  those 
darkies  were  drawn  to  Ephraim's  place  by  those 
chickens  than  I  have  that  a  magnet  will  draw  a 
needle.  I  can't  explain  how  it  was  done,  but  I 
believe  it  all  the  same.  It  is  what  is  called  a 
mystery,  and  the  good  book  says  that  the  less 
you  try  to  explain  mysteries  the  better." 


MY  BROTHER  ELIJAH. 

"  I  NEVER  told  you  about  my  brother,  the  in- 
ventor, did  I?"  asked  the  Colonel.  "Speaking 
of  flying-machines  reminds  me  of  him,  for  he 
invented  seven  of  them,  and  one  of  the  lot  was 
a  stunning  success.  Stunned  one  darky  and 
came  very  near  stunning  a  whole  camp-meeting 
of  darkies.  My  brother  Lije — his  name  was 
Elijah — was  what  you  might  call  a  general  in- 
ventor. He  didn't  stick  to  any  one  line,  such 
as  electricity,  for  example,  but  he  would  invent 
anything,  from  a  woman's  pocket  to  a  new 
motive  power.  He  invented  a  pocket  for  a 
woman's  skirt  that  was  warranted  never  to  be 
found  by  the  most  expert  pickpocket,  and  he  put 
the  pocket  in  the  skirt  of  his  wife's  dress  on 
trial.  She  searched  for  it  for  about  a  month — 
not  all  the  time,  you  understand,  but  on  an 

average  three  or  four  hours  a  day — and  then 
93 


94  TOLD   BY    THE   COLONEL. 

gave  it  up.  She  said  she  could  always  find  her 
usual  old-fashioned  pocket  in  the  course  of  a 
week  or  ten  days,  and  that  was  as  much  time 
as  she  could  afford  to  waste  on  the  subject.  As 
for  Elijah's  perpetual-motion  machines,  he  in- 
vented a  new  one  at  least  every  year,  and  the 
loft  in  our  barn  was  always  full  of  them.  Of 
course  they  were  failures,  but  that  did  not  dis- 
courage Lije.  You  can't  discourage  a  born 
inventor — that  is,  unless  he  is  in  the  chemical 
line  and  blows  himself  up  with  some  new  kind 
of  dynamite.  Lije's  inventions  were,  to  my 
mind,  as  smart  as  those  of  Edison,  but  the 
trouble  with  them  was  that  for  the  most  part 
they  wouldn't  work.  However,  they  amused 
him  and  did  no  harm  to  anybody. 

"  My  brother  was  not  in  the  least  like  me  in 
anything.  He  was  short  and  stout  and  the 
best-tempered  man  in  the  State.  Everybody 
liked  him,  especially  the  darkies,  who  said  that 
there  was  no  more  harm  in  him  than  if  he  was 
a  child.  I've  seen  him  when  he  had  just 
accidentally  chopped  off  a  finger  or  had  burnt 
all  his  hair  off,  and  I  never  heard  him  use  the 


MY   BROTHER    ELIJAH. 


95 


smallest  swear- word.  I  never  could  see  why  he 
got  married.  A  man  with  that  sort  of  heavenly 
temper  doesn't  need  the  discipline  that  other 


folks  need,  and  he  was  too  much  absorbed  in 
science  to  have  any  time  to  associate  with  a 
wife.  He  spent  nearly  all  his  time  in  his  work- 


96  TOLD    BY    THE    COLONEL. 

shop  monkeying  with  his  inventions,  and  his 
only  companion  was  a  darky  boy,  about  twelve 
years  old,  named  Aristophanes,  who  waited  on 
him  and  was  so  fond  of  him  that  there  is  noth- 
ing that  Lije  told  him  to  do  that  Aristophanes 
wouldn't  do.  If  Lije  had  invented  a  new  guil- 
lotine and  wanted  to  try  it  on  Aristophanes' 
neck,  the  boy  would  have  consented  to  have  his 
head  chopped  off,  and  would  never  have  doubted 
that  Massa  Lije  would  put  it  on  again  without 
even  leaving  a  scar. 

"You  were  speaking  of  this  new  flying- 
machine  that  somebody  had  just  invented  and 
that  acts  on  the  principle  of  a  kite.  'Resistance 
of  an  inclined  plane  to  the  air'  is  what  you 
called  it,  but  that  means  kite,  and  nothing  else. 
Why,  Elijah  invented  that  machine  forty  years 
ago,  and  it  was  one  of  his  greatest  successes, 
the  only  one,  in  fact,  that  I  ever  remember  his 
making.  When  I  say  that  it  was  successful,  I 
don't  mean  to  say  that  it  was  practicable.  It 
would  rise  and  it  would  carry  a  man  with  it, 
but  it  never  came  into  general  use,  for  it  was 
about  impossible  to  get  the  man  down  again 


MY   BROTHER   ELIJAH.  97 

without  killing  him.  Next  to  a  Swiss  excursion 
steamboat,  it  was  the  riskiest  mode  of  locomo- 
tion ever  invented. 

"  The  way  in  which  Lije's  machine  was  con- 
structed was  very  simple.  You  must  have  seen 
what  we  boys  used  to  call  a  spider-web  kite.  If 
you  haven't,  I  might  as  well  tell  you  that  it  is 
made  with  three  sticks  that  cross  one  another  at 
the  same  point  in  about  the  middle  of  the  kite, 
or  rather  a  little  above  the  middle,  and  gave  the 
kite  something  the  shape  and  look  of  a  big 
spider-web.  Lije  was  fond  of  kite-flying,  and 
was  always  trying  to  make  improvements  in 
kite-building,  which  were  naturally  failures, 
for  you  can  be  sure  that  the  millions  of  boys 
that  have  been  making  kites  ever  since  boys 
were  first  invented  know  a  great  sight  more 
about  kites  than  any  scientific  man  knows. 

"Elijah's  flying-machine  was  nothing  more 
or  less  than  the  biggest  spider-web  kite  that  was 
ever  built.  The  sticks  were  ash  poles  an  inch 
in  diameter,  and  they  were  covered  with  silk 
instead  of  paper.  I  forget  the  exact  dimensions 
of  the  kite,  but  according  to  Lije's  calculations 


98  TOLD   BY    THE    COLONEL. 

it  would  sustain  a  hundred  and  fifty  pounds  of 
human  being,  in  addition  to  its  own  weight  and 
the  weight  of  its  tail.  The  question  of  the  exact 
amount  of  tail  that  the  kite  would  require  gave 
Lije  a  good  deal  of  trouble,  but  he  solved  it  like 
a  man  of  science  by  sending  up  an  ordinary 
kite  and  finding  by  experiment  how  much  tail 
it  needed,  after  which  he  calculated  by  the  rule 
of  three  how  much  tail  to  give  his  flying- 
machine.  In  order  to  get  the  necessary  weight 
without  too  great  length,  the  tail  of  the  flying- 
machine  was  made  of  light  iron  chain,  and  at 
the  end  of  it  there  was  an  iron  hook,  so  that  a 
lantern  could  be  attached  to  it  at  night.  As 
for  the  string  that  was  to  hold  the  kite,  it  was 
about  the  size  of  a  ship's  signal-halyards,  and 
Lije  calculated  that  it  would  bear  twice  the 
amount  of  any  strain  that  could  possibly  be  put 
on  it. 

"  Aristophanes  was  to  make  the  trial  trip,  and 
he  was  perfectly  willing  to  go,  never  having  the 
least  doubt  that  Massa  Lije  would  secure  him  a 
safe  and  pleasant  trip  to  the  moon  or  there- 
abouts. Lije  fastened  the  boy  in  the  centre  of 


MY    BROTHER    ELIJAH.  99 

the  kite,  in  about  the  position  of  some  celebrated 
Scotchman — St.  Andrew, wasn't  it? — whose  pic- 
ture is  in  Fox's  'Book  of  Martyrs.'  Aristo- 
phanes' arms  and  legs  were  lashed  to  the  kite 
sticks,  and  he  had  a  sort  of  rest  for  each  foot, 
so  as  to  take  the  strain  from  off  the  lashings.  In 
order  to  make  him  comfortable,  Lije  fastened  a 
pillow  under  the  boy's  head,  so  that  he  could  go 
to  sleep  in  case  he  should  feel  sleepy,  which  he 
nearly  always  did.  If  Aristophanes  could  only 
have  managed  to  take  his  dinner  with  him  and 
eat  it  in  the  air,  he  would  have  been  about  as 
happy  as  a  darky  can  be,  and  an  average 
darky  can  hold  more  happiness  to  the  square 
inch  than  any  white  man. 

"  The  trial  trip  was  made  from  the  back  yard 
of  our  house,  and  nobody  was  present  except 
Lije  and  Aristophanes,  for  my  brother  was  a 
little  shy  of  exhibiting  his  inventions  in  public, 
owing  to  their  habit  of  proving  failures.  The 
kite  was  laid  on  the  ground,  and  Aristophanes 
was  strapped  to  it  and  told  that  he  must  keep 
perfectly  cool  and  remember  everything  that  he 
might  see  in  the  clouds.  When  all  was  ready, 


100  TOLD  BY  THE   COLONEL. 

the  kite  was  leaned  up  against  the  side  of  the 
barn,  with  the  tail  neatly  coiled  so  that  it  would 
not  foul  anything,  and  then  Elijah,  taking  a 
good  run  with  the  string  over  his  shoulder,  had 
the  satisfaction  of  making  the  kite  climb  up  as 
if  it  had  been  made  by  the  best  boy  kite-builder 
in  town. 

"  Holding  the  string  was  rather  a  tough  job, 
for  the  kite  pulled  tremendously,  and  Lije  was 
not  a  strong  man.  However,  he  paid  out  the 
line  as  fast  as  he  could,  and  so  managed  to  keep 
the  kite  steady.  He  was  a  little  afraid  that  it 
would  accidentally  get  away  from  him,  so  he 
tied  the  end  of  the  string  round  his  waist. 
There  was  where  he  made  his  great  mistake. 

"  The  kite  attracted  a  good  deal  of  attention 
in  the  town,  and  everybody  agreed  that  the 
figure  in  the  middle  of  the  kite  was  a  remark- 
ably good  representation  of  a  darky,  but  nobody 
thought  for  a  moment  that  it  was  a  genuine 
darky.  Lije  had  forgotten,  in  estimating  the 
amount  of  tail  that  the  kite  required,  the  fact 
that  the  wind  might  rise  while  the  kite  was  in 
the  air,  and  that  in  such  case  the  amount  of  tail 


"ELIJAH'S  FLYING-MACHINE.'' 
101 


102  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

might  not  be  enough  to  keep  it  from  diving. 
That  is  just  what  happened.  After  the  kite 
had  run  out  all  the  string  and  was  as  high 
as  the  string  would  let  it  go,  the  wind  in- 
creased and  the  kite  began  to  dive.  Now, 
everybody  knows  that  diving  is  one  of  the  most 
dangerous  things  a  kite  can  do,  and  that  unless 
it  can  be  stopped  it  is  sure  to  bring  the  kite 
down  and  smash  it  to  pieces.  Moreover,  in  this 
particular  case  there  was  Aristophanes,  who 
was  pretty  sure  to  be  frightened  by  the  diving 
of  the  kite — that  is,  supposing  that  he  was 
awake.  When  a  kite  dives  the  only  remedy  is 
to  give  it  string.  As  Lije  had  no  more  string 
to  let  out  he  was  obliged  to  do  the  next  best 
thing,  which  was  to  slack  the  string  by  running 
with  it  toward  the  kite.  That  stopped  the  div- 
ing, but  only  for  a  moment.  Every  time  that 
Lije  tried  to  stop  running  and  managed  to  hold 
back  a  little  against  the  kite,  it  would  begin  to 
dive  again,  and  about  half  the  time  was  de- 
scribing circles  in  the  air  and  turning  Aristo- 
phanes upside  down.  However,  Lije  knew  that 
so  long  as  he  could  keep  the  kite  from  dashing 


MY   BROTHER   ELIJAH.  103 

itself  to  the  ground  the  darky  would  come  to 
no  harm. 

"The  wind  kept  on  increasing  and  the  kite 
pulled  harder  than  ever.  Even  if  Lije  had  not 
wanted  to  run,  the  kite  would  have  dragged 
him.  He  went  through  the  town  at  about  eight 
miles  an  hour,  yelling  to  everybody  he  met, 
'Gimme  some  string!'  But  nobody  understood 
what  he  said,  and  they  all  thought  that  it  was 
a  good  joke  to  see  a  fat  little  man  careering  over 
the  country  in  tow  of  a  big  kite.  Of  course 
they  supposed  that  Lije  was  acting  of  his  own 
free  will  and  accord.  They  knew  that  he  was 
peculiar  in  his  ways,  and  they  fancied  that  he 
was  taking  a  little  holiday  after  his  hard  work. 
So  beyond  encouraging  him  to  keep  it  up  and 
remarking  to  one  another  that  'Lije  was  the 
most  amusing  darned  fool  in  the  county, '  they 
paid  no  attention  to  his  outcries. 

"  My  brother  was  not  used  to  active  exercise 
and  had  next  to  no  wind.  The  longer  he  ran 
with  the  kite,  the  more  he  felt  convinced  that  a 
tragedy  was  about  to  happen.  If  he  kept  on 
running  he  believed  he  would  drop  dead  with 


104  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

stoppage  of  the  heart,  and  if  he  stopped  running 
he  knew  that  the  kite  would  dash  Aristophanes 
to  pieces ;  and  though,  of  course,  it  was  not  as  if 
Aristophanes  had  been  a  white  boy,  still  there 
was  the  chance  that  his  parents  would  be  dis- 
agreeable if  he  were  killed.  They  were  ordi- 
nary ignorant  darkies,  with  no  sort  of  love  for 
science.  But  Lije  had  grit  in  him,  in  spite  of 
all  the  science  that  he  had  pumped  into  his 
head.  He  stuck  to  the  kite-string,  and  ran  his 
level  best  until  the  moment  came  when  he  was 
unable  to  catch  another  breath.  Then  he  threw 
himself  against  a  telegraph  pole  and  clung  to  it 
with  all  his  might.  The  kite  couldn't  drag  him 
away  from  it,  and  so  it  gave  one  tremendous 
dive,  and  Lije  felt  by  the  sudden  slackening  of 
the  string  that  the  kite  had  reached  the  ground. 
"  It  came  down  in  the  middle  of  a  negro  camp- 
meeting  that  was  in  progress  about  a  quarter  of 
a  mile  away.  The  spot  was  a  sandy  one,  and 
the  kite,  which  naturally  fell  head  downward, 
buried  the  ends  of  its  upper  sticks  in  the  sand, 
and  did  no  injury  whatever  to  Aristophanes. 
The  chain  tail,  however,  damaged  the  eye  of 


*HIT  THE  REV.   JCLIUS  C-ESAR  WASHINGTON  ON  THE  SIDE  OF  THE   HEAD.' 


105 


106  TOLD    BY    THE    COLONEL. 

the  Rev.  Hannibal  Blue,  and  then  hit  the  Rev. 
Julius  Csesar  Washington  on  the  side  of  the 
head  and  stunned  him  for  half  an  hour.  There 
was  a  good  deal  of  excitement  in  the  camp  when 
Aristophanes  descended.  Most  of  the  colored 
people  were  of  the  opinion  that  he  was  an  angel 
who  had  come  down  to  express  his  satisfaction 
with  the  services,  though  the  Rev.  Mr.  Blue 
was  strongly  of  the  opinion  that  Aristophanes 
was  the  devil  in  person,  who  was  seeking  to 
buffet  the  faithful.  In  time,  however,  Aristo- 
phanes was  recognized  as  the  private  servant  of 
Massa  Lije,  and  was  released  from  the  kite  and 
allowed  to  return  to  Lije's  workshop  to  report 
the  result  of  his  voyage  in  the  flying-machine. 
"  The  flying-machine  was  never  tried  again. 
Lije  had  had  enough  of  it,  and  besides,  some 
of  the  Rev.  Mr.  Blue's  friends,  who  were  not 
exactly  what  you  would  call  law-abiding  citi- 
zens, sent  Lije  word  that  they  rather  thought 
that  if  he  quit  inventing  things  he  would  live 
longer  than  he  otherwise  might.  Aristophanes 
didn't  seem  to  think  anything  of  his  adventure, 
and  said  he  was  ready  to  go  up  again  whenever 


MY   BROTHER   ELIJAH.  107 

Massa  Lije  should  want  to  send  him.  But  Lije 
told  him  that  he  intended  to  make  a  little  modi- 
fication in  his  flying-machine  before  using  it 
again.  That  was  what  he  always  said  when 
he  gave  an  invention  up  as  a  bad  job,  and 
accordingly  nobody  ever  saw  or  heard  of  the 
flying-machine  again.  He  was  a  remarkable 
man,  was  my  brother,  and  the  doctor  of  the 
asylum  where  he  spent  his  declining  years  said 
that  he  was  the  most  interesting  lunatic  that  he 
had  ever  met." 


THE   ST.  BERNARD   MYTH: 

SOME  one  had  told  a  dog-story  showing  the 
miraculous  intelligence  and  profound  piety  of  a 
French  poodle.  The  Colonel  listened  with  an 
incredulous  smile  on  his  grim  face.  When  the 
story  was  ended  and  we  had  all  expressed  our 
surprise  and  admiration,  as  is  the  custom  when 
dog-stories  are  told,  and  had  carefully  suppressed 
our  conviction  that  the  man  who  told  the  story 
was  as  impudent  as  he  was  mendacious — as  is 
also  the  custom  on  these  occasions — I  asked  the 
Colonel  to  favor  us  with  his  views  in  regard  to 
canine  sagacity. 

"There  are  dogs  that  show  signs  of  good 
sense  now  and  then, "  he  replied.  "  Even  human 
beings  do  that  occasionally.  But  as  to  these 
yarns  about  dogs  who  calculate  eclipses  and 
have  conscientious  objections  to  chasing  cats  on 

Sunday,  I  don't  believe  a  word  of  them.     Talk 
108 


THE   ST.  BERNARD   MYTH.  109 

about  fish-stories!  Why,  there  isn't  a  fish 
caught  or  uncaught  that  can  begin  to  stimulate 
the  imagination  to  the  extent  that  a  dog  will 
stimulate  it.  I  have  known  fishermen  who 
could  convert  two  minnows  into  a  string  of 
thirty  trout,  averaging  two  pounds  each,  and  I 
have  seen  these  men  slink  away  crestfallen  be- 
fore a  man  who  told  stories  of  what  his  fox- 
terrier  had  done  the  day  before.  What  I  don't 
understand  is  why  people  pretend  to  believe  dog- 
stories.  We  all  know  that  the  dog  is  a  well- 
meaning,  stupid,  parish-vestry  sort  of  an  ani- 
mal, but  we  listen  to  the  thumpers  that  some 
men  tell  about  him  without  even  a  cough. 

"  Look  at  the  lies  that  have  been  told  for  the 
last  hundred  years  about  the  St.  Bernard  dogs ! 
People  really  believe  that  when  a  snow-storm 
comes  on  the  St.  Bernard  dog  goes  out  with  a 
blanket,  a  flask  of  whiskey,  a  spirit-lamp,  a  box 
of  matches,  some  mustard  plasters,  and  a  foot- 
bath strapped  on  his  back.  When  he  meets  a 
frozen  traveller  we  are  told  that  he  sits  down 
and  lights  his  spirit-lamp,  mixes  some  hot- whis- 
key and  pours  it  down  the  traveller's  throat, 


110 


TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 


gives  him  a  hot  foot-bath,  puts  mustard  plasters 
on  the  soles  of  his  feet,  rubs  him  down  and 
wraps  him  up  in  the  blanket,  and  then  hoists 


THE   MONKS   SHIED    PRAYER-BOOKS    AND    W( 


SANDALS  AT   THEM. 


him  on  his  back  and  brings  him  to  the  convent, 
where  the  monks  put  him  to  bed  and  read 
prayers  to  him  till  he  feels  strong  enough  to  put 


THE   ST.  BERNARD    MYTH.  Ill 

some  money  in  the  contribution-box  and  to  con- 
tinue his  journey.  Now,  I've  been  to  the  St. 
Bernard  Convent.  I  went  there  just  to  meet 
one  of  these  dogs  and  see  for  myself  what  he 
could  do.  There  was  a  pack  of  about  forty  of 
them,  but  the  only  thing  they  did  was  to  sit  up 
all  night  and  bark  at  the  moon,  while  the  monks 
shied  prayer-books  and  wooden  sandals  at  them 
out  of  the  windows.  I  wanted  to  see  a  few 
travellers  rescued  from  the  snow,  but  the  monks 
said  the  supply  of  travellers  had  been  running 
low  of  late  years;  still,  they  added,  if  I'd  go 
and  sleep  in  a  snow-bank  a  mile  or  two  from 
the  convent,  they  would  see  what  could  be  done. 
I  wasn't  going  to  risk  the  forfeiture  of  my  life- 
insurance  policy  by  any  such  foolishness  as  that, 
so  I  came  away  without  seeing  any  dog  per- 
formance. However,  I  saw  enough,  a  little 
later  on,  to  convince  me  that  the  St.  Bernard 
dog  is  about  the  biggest  kind  of  canine  fool  that 
ever  imposed  on  credulous  people. 

"  The  monks  had  a  whole  penful  of  genuine 
St.  Bernard  puppies,  and  I  bought  one.  I  am 
ashamed  to  tell  you  how  much  I  paid  for  it.  I 


112  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

could  hire  an  army  mule  to  kick  me  every  time 
I  think  of  the  transaction.  I  took  the  puppy 
to  the  States  with  me — I  was  living  at  New 
Berlinopolisville,  in  the  State  of  Iowa,  at  the 
time — and  brought  him  up  as  carefully  as  if  he 
had  been  my  own  son.  He  grew  to  be  a  big, 
rough-haired  dog — one  of  the  biggest  I  ever 
saw.  And  I  can't  say  that  the  monks  cheated 
me  in  respect  to  his  breed.  Of  course  it  was  all 
a  matter  of  luck  that  he  didn't  turn  out  to  be  a 
poodle  or  a  black  and  tan  terrier.  The  fact  is 
that  no  man  or  monk  knows  what  one  of  those 
pure-blooded  St.  Bernard  pups  that  are  sold  at 
the  convent  will  turn  out  to  be  when  he  gets  his 
growth.  He  is  liable  to  be  anything  in  the  line 
of  dog,  from  a  yellow  cur  up  to  a  Siberian  blood- 
hound. I  once  knew  a  man  who  bought  a  St. 
Bernard  pup  from  one  of  the  very  holiest  of  the 
entire  gang  of  monks,  and  that  puppy  grew  up 
to  be  a  red  fox.  But  you  all  know  of  the  St. 
Bernard  puppy  lottery,  and  I  won't  take  up 
your  time  commenting  on  it. 

"  The  monks  told  me  that  the  puppy  would 
not  need  the  least  training.     His  instinct  was 


THE   ST.  BERNARD    MYTH. 


113 


so  wonderful  that  the  moment  he  should  catch 
a  glimpse  of  snow  on  the  ground  he  would  rush 
off  to  rescue  travellers.  'You  just  load  him  up 
with  blankets  and  things,'  said  the  monk,  'and 


'"  SAID  THE    DOG   HAD   PROMISED   THEM   A  DRINK." 

send  him  out  in  the  snow,  and  he'll  rescue 
travellers  till  you  can't  rest.'  The  dog  was 
nearly  a  year  old  before  I  had  a  chance  to  try 
his  powers,  but  one  November  we  had  a  regular 


114  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

blizzard,  and  when  the  snow  quit  falling  it  was 
at  least  two  feet  deep  on  a  level,  not  to  speak  of 
the  drifts. 

"  After  breakfast  I  tied  a  whiskey-flask  around 
the  dog's  neck  and  put  a  blanket  on  his  back, 
and  told  him  to  go  out  and  begin  his  blessed 
work  of  mercy.  I  was  alone  in  the  house  at 
the  time,  for  my  wife  had  gone  on  a  visit  to  her 
mother  and  the  cook  had  got  herself  arrested 
for  being  drunk  and  disorderly,  so  there  was  no 
one  to  make  any  objection  to  my  use  of  one  of 
my  wife's  best  blankets.  The  dog  barked  with 
delight  when  he  saw  the  snow,  and  rolled  in  it 
for  a  few  moments  just  so  as  to  get  the  blanket 
good  and  wet,  and  then  he  started  down  the 
street  at  a  gallop.  I  lived  something  more 
than  a  mile  from  the  village,  and  there  were  no 
houses  nearer  than  half  a  mile,  and  as  the  dog 
took  the  road  leading  away  from  the  village,  I 
did  not  think  that  he  would  stand  much  chance 
of  picking  up  any  travellers.  He  didn't  return 
until  noon,  and  then  he  didn't  bring  anybody 
home  on  his  back.  He  did,  however,  bring  six 
tramps  with  him,  three  of  whom  were  pretty 


THE   ST.  BERNARD   MYTH.  115 

drunk,  they  having  drank  all  the  whiskey  in  the 
flask.  The  other  three  said  that  the  dog  had 
promised  them  a  drink  if  they  would  follow 
him,  and  they  hoped  that  I  would  be  as  good  as 
the  dog's  word.  As  I  wasn't  armed,  and  as  the 
tramps  carried  big  sticks  and  evidently  meant 
business,  I  judged  it  best  to  sustain  the  dog's 
character  for  veracity  and  get  rid  of  them 
peaceably.  They  went  away  after  wrestling 
with  a  pint  of  good  whiskey,  and  all  the  time 
that  idiotic  dog  was  wagging  his  tail  as  if  he 
deserved  the  Humane  Society's  medal,  instead 
of  deserving  a  thrashing  for  trying  to  rescue 
tramps  when  Nature  had  taken  the  trouble  to 
furnish  a  blizzard  expressly  to  thin  them  out. 

"  I  explained  to  the  dog  with  my  riding- whip 
the  view  that  he  must  take  of  tramps  in  the 
future,  and  then  I  sent  him  out  again,  after 
filling  up  his  whiskey-flask  and  giving  him 
another  blanket  in  the  place  of  the  one  that  the 
tramps  had  stolen.  I  told  him  that  in  future  I 
should  prefer  to  have  him  rescue  women  and 
children,  especially  the  latter,  and  that  if  he 
found  a  frozen  male  traveller  he  had  better  con- 


116  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

fine  himself  to  giving  information  to  the  police, 
instead  of  lavishing  whiskey  on  possibly  un- 
deserving people.  He  went  off,  somewhat 
humbled,  but  still  in  excellent  spirits,  and  in  a 
short  time  rushed  up  my  front  steps,  dropped 
something  on  the  door-mat,  and  rushed  off 
again.  At  first  I  thought  that  the  idiot  had 
been  rescuing  somebody's  linen  that  had  been 
hung  out  to  dry,  but  when  the  linen  began  to 
make  remarks  in  a  loud  voice,  I  found  that  it 
was  a  particularly  lively  baby. 

"  Of  course  I  couldn't  let  the  little  innocent 
lie  and  freeze  on  my  doorstep,  so  I  brought  it 
into  the  house  and  did  my  best  to  quiet  it.  As 
I  had  never  had  much  experience  with  babies, 
I  found  myself  in  a  pretty  tight  place.  I  had 
no  milk  to  give  the  baby,  so  I  mixed  a  little 
flour  and  water  till  it  looked  like  milk  and  got 
a  little  of  it  down  the  baby's  throat.  Then  I 
shook  it  on  my  knee  till  it  dropped  asleep.  I 
put  it  in  my  bed,  intending  to  go  out  and  find 
some  woman  who  would  come  and  attend  to  it, 
when  I  heard  the  dog  barking,  and  on  opening 
the  front  door  saw  his  tail  disappearing  down 


THE   ST.  BERNARD    MYTH.  117 

the  street,  and  saw  that  he  had  left  another 
infant  on  the  door-mat. 

"The  first  baby  was  a  saint  in  comparison 
with  this  one,  which  was  a  sort  of  infantile 
tramp  in  appearance  and  was  as  noisy  as  it 
was  dirty.  It  would  not  have  anything  to  do 
with  the  flour  and  water,  and  though  I  shook 
it  on  my  knee  till  I  must  have  loosened  all  its 
organs,  it  refused  to  go  to  sleep.  So  I  finally 
gave  it  a  rubber  overshoe  to  bite  on,  and  put  it 
in  a  bureau  drawer  in  the  spare  room  and  told 
it  to  howl  its  head  off  if  it  felt  that  such  was  its 
duty  toward  mankind.  Then  I  started  a  second 
time  to  search  for  a  woman,  and  I  nearly  fell 
over  a  third  baby  on  the  doorstep.  That  infer- 
nal dog  had  brought  it  while  I  was  struggling 
with  the  infantile  tramp,  and  he  was  now  off 
searching  for  more  infants.  I  wrapped  this  one 
up  in  a  blanket  and  sat  down  on  the  doorstep 
with  it,  resolved  to  wait  till  that  dog  came 
back  and  to  lock  him  up  till  I  could  get  enough 
babies  off  my  hands  to  give  me  a  chance  to  kill 
him.  I  was  bound  not  to  miss  him,  for  if  I  did 
he  would  probably  keep  on  till  he  had  brought 


US  TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL. 

me  all  the  babies  in  the  county.  This  baby  was 
the  best  of  the  lot,  for  it  slept  in  my  arms  with- 
out saying  a  word  or  expressing  the  slightest 
desire  to  be  shaken.  In  about  twenty  minutes 
the  dog  reappeared  with  another  invoice  of 
babies.  This  time  he  brought  a  brace  of  twins, 
as  nearly  as  I  could  judge,  but  it  was  his  last 
exploit  that  day.  I  got  him  by  the  collar  before 
he  could  start  out  again  and  locked  him  up  in 
the  cellar.  The  babies  I  put  in  a  heap  in  a  big 
clothes-basket  that  they  could  not  climb  out  of, 
and  left  them  to  have  a  crying-match  for  the 
championship  till  I  could  find  a  nurse. 

"  I  didn't  have  as  much  trouble  in  that  matter 
as  I  had  anticipated,  for  before  I  could  get  out  of 
the  house  some  one  rang  the  front-door  bell  and 
pounded  and  yelled  as  if  it  was  a  matter  of  life 
and  death  that  the  door  should  be  opened  in- 
stantly. I  opened  it,  and  there  was  a  woman 
who  called  me  every  name  she  could  lay  her 
tongue  to,  and  wanted  me  to  give  her  back  her 
baby  instantly.  I  showed  her  the  babies  and 
told  her  to  take  her  choice.  In  fact,  I  begged 
her  to  take  away  the  whole  lot,  but  she  said  I 


THE   ST.  BERNARD   MYTH.  119 

was  worse  than  a  murderer,  and  after  selecting 
one  of  the  least  desirable  of  the  babies,  she 
rushed  off  with  it,  promising  to  send  me  a 
policeman  immediately.  I  had  never  expressed 
the  least  desire  to  see  a  policeman,  but  such  is 
female  gratitude!  I  had  offered  that  woman 
five  babies,  free,  gratis,  and  for  nothing,  and 
instead  of  being  grateful  she  wanted  to  get  me 
into  trouble. 

"  I  had  still  four  babies  on  my  hands,  and  as 
they  were  now  all  awake  and  making  all  the 
noise  they  knew  how  to  make,  I  put  them  all  in 
the  clothes-basket  together,  so  they  could  enjoy 
one  another's  society.  It  wasn't  a  bad  plan, 
and  I  recommend  it  to  any  mother  with  a  noisy 
pair  of  twins,  as  it  is  certain  to  reduce  the  noise 
by  one-half.  Two  of  my  babies  were  so  occu- 
pied with  putting  their  fingers  in  the  other 
babies'  eyes  and  in  investigating  their  hair 
that  they  had  no  time  to  cry.  I  admit  that  the 
two  who  were  undergoing  investigation  did 
their  best  to  make  a  riot,  but  even  then  there 
was  only  half  as  much  noise  as  there  would 
have  been  had  the  other  two  joined  the  concert. 


120  TOLD   BY   THE  COLONEL. 

"  I  thought  it  so  probable  that  the  mother  who 
had  visited  me  was  only  the  first  of  a  procession 
of  mothers,  that  I  gave  up  the  idea  of  going  out 
to  look  for  a  nurse,  and  stayed  at  home  to  re- 
ceive the  mothers  politely.  It  was  not  long 
before  one  presented  herself.  She  was  an  Irish- 
woman and  the  only  sensible  one  of  the  lot. 
When  she  saw  that  her  baby  was  safe  and  con- 
tented and  had  a  good  grip  on  the  hair  of  a 
black-eyed  baby,  she  sat  down  and  laughed,  and 
said  that  she  never  saw  anything  so  sweet  be- 
fore. According  to  her  account,  she  lived 
about  a  mile  from  my  house,  and  she  was 
standing  at  her  front  door  looking  at  the  land- 
scape, when  the  dog  bounded  in,  caught  up  the 
baby  out  of  the  cradle,  and  carried  it  off.  At 
first  she  thought  the  dog  was  the  devil,  but 
presently  she  remembered  that  the  devil's  time 
was  too  much  occupied  with  Irish  affairs  to  per- 
mit hkn  to  steal  babies  in  Iowa,  so  she  followed 
the  dog  as  rapidly  as  she  could  make  her  way 
through  the  snow.  She  tracked  him  by  the 
prints  of  his  paws  until  she  came  to  my  door, 
and  instead  of  calling  me  a  kidnapper  and  talk- 


THE   ST.  BERNARD    MYTH.  121 

ing  about  the  police,  she  was  full  of  pity  for  me, 
and  volunteered  to  stay  and  take  care  of  the 
whole  menagerie  until  the  last  of  the  babies 
should  be  called  for  and  taken  away. 

"  The  remaining  mothers  arrived  in  the  course 
of  an  hour.  I  locked  myself  in  the  top  of  the 
house  and  left  the  Irishwoman  to  explain  things. 
As  I  afterward  learned,  the  intelligent  dog  had 
knocked  two  women  down  in  the  street  and 
stolen  their  babies  out  of  their  arms,  and  had 
also  broken  into  two  houses,  in  the  last  one  of 
which  he  had  bagged  his  brace  of  twins.  All 
the  mothers,  except  the  Irishwoman,  were  as 
unreasonable  as  they  could  possibly  be.  They 
insisted  that  I  deliberately  trained  dogs  to  steal 
babies,  and  they  had  no  doubt  that  my  object  in 
stealing  them  was  to  vivisect  them.  As  for  the 
dog,  they  were  convinced  that  he  was  mad  and 
that  their  babies  would  be  sure  to  die  of  hydro- 
phobia. Two  of  the  women  brought  their  hus- 
bands with  them,  who  asked  to  see  me,  explain- 
ing that  they  desired  to  blow  my  head  off. 
The  Irishwoman  nobly  lied  to  them,  telling 
them  that  she  had  driven  me  out  of  the  house 


122  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

with  a  club,  and  that  I  was  on  my  way  to 
Chicago  and  far  out  of  reach.  The  mothers 
and  their  husbands  went  away  at  last,  and  as 
soon  as  it  was  dark  I  stole  out  of  the  back  door 
and  took  the  first  train  for  St.  Paul.  I  didn't 
show  myself  in  New  Berlinopolisville  for  the 
next  year. 

"  What  became  of  the  dog?  Oh !  I  forgot  to 
say  that  the  Irishwoman  promised  to  take  care 
of  him  and  to  cure  him  of  his  passion  for  babies. 
I  am  sorry  to  say  that  she  did  not  succeed. 
She  kept  him  tied  up  for  six  weeks,  but  one  day 
he  broke  loose  and  captured  a  baby  out  of  a 
baby- wagon  in  the  park.  But  the  baby's  father 
happened  to  be  with  it,  and  he  was  one  of  the 
best  pistol-shots  in  town,  having  been  a  judge 
of  the  Montana  Supreme  Court.  He  got  the 
drop  on  the  dog  before  the  beast  had  gone  ten 
feet  away  with  the  baby,  and  though  they  after- 
ward had  to  pry  the  dog's  jaws  open  in  order  to 
get  the  baby  loose,  no  harm  was  done  to  the 
latter.  I  settled  all  the  lawsuits  without  letting 
them  go  to  trial,  although  it  cost  me  consider- 


THE   ST.  BERNARD    MYTH.  123 

able,  and  I  finally  judged  it  best  to  remove  to 
another  State. 

"  Now,  I  suppose  that  some  one  will  be  enough 
of  an  idiot  to  repeat  this  story  with  variations 
as  a  proof  of  the  wonderful  intelligence  of  the 
St.  Bernard  dog.  If  it  is  intelligence  that  leads 
a  dog  to  steal  other  people's  babies  and  dump 
them  on  a  respectable  man,  I'd  like  to  see  what 
idiocy  would  do  for  such  a  dog.  No,  sir !  de- 
pend upon  it,  the  stories  about  St.  Bernard  dogs 
are  invented  by  the  monks  after  stimulating 
their  minds  by  reading  the '  Lives  of  -the  Saints ' 
and  by  going  trout-fishing.  Probably  the 
monks  have  gradually  brought  themselves  to 
believe  most  of  the  stories.  They  look  like  a 
credulous  set  of  people,  and  I  should  rather  like 
to  try  them  with  a  good  American  political 
speech,  full  of  campaign  statistics,  and  see  if 
they  could  believe  it.  I  shouldn't  be  in  the 
least  surprised  if  they  could." 


A  MATRIMONIAL  ROMANCE. 

"AND  by  the  way,"  continued  the  Colonel, 
"  a  curious  thing  about  this  Josiah  Wilson  was 
that  he  was  married  for  fifteen  years  and  never 
had  any  wife  whatever. ' 

The  Colonel  had  begun  a  story  concerning 
one  Josiah  Wilson  which  promised  to  be  in- 
teresting, but  his  incidental  allusion  to  Mr. 
Wilson's  matrimonial  experience  awakened  our 
curiosity,  and  we  begged  him  to  interrupt  his 
narrative  long  enough  to  tell  us  how  it  came  to 
pass  that  Josiah  was  a  married  man  who  never 
had  a  wife. 

"The  marriage  laws  in  the  United  States," 
said  the  Colonel,  giving  his  chair  an  increased 
tilt  backward,  which  was  his  usual  way  of  be- 
ginning a  fresh  anecdote,  "are  as  peculiar  in 
their  way  as  are  the  divorce  laws.  You  would 
think  to  look  at  them  that  they  would  permit 

anybody  to  marry  anybody  else  in  any  way  that 
124 


A  MATRIMONIAL   ROMANCE. 


125 


either  of  them  might  choose ;  but  for  all  that 
they  sometimes  make  it  impossible  for  a  man  or 
a  woman  to  get  married.  There  was  a  couple 


"HOWLED  FOR  HELP  WHEN  HE  WASN'T  SWEARING." 

who  intended  to  be  married  in  a  balloon,  which 
is  a  style  of  lunacy  that  is  quite  fashionable  in 
some  parts  of  the  country,  though  I  can't  see 


126  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

why  a  man  should  want  to  risk  his  neck  in  a 
balloon  on  his  wedding-day,  unless  it  is  that  it 
takes  so  much  courage  to  be  married  at  all  that 
a  man  forgets  all  about  such  minor  dangers  as 
are  connected  with  ballooning.  The  bride,  the 
minister,  and  two  witnesses  of  assorted  sexes 
went  up  in  the  balloon  at  the  appointed  time, 
and,  naturally,  the  bridegroom  intended  to  go 
with  them,  but  he  accidentally  caught  his  foot 
in  a  neglected  guy-rope  and  went  up  head 
downward  about  twenty  feet  below  the  car.  The 
party  in  the  balloon  could  not  haul  him  up  be- 
cause they  could  not  get  hold  of  the  rope,  and 
the  bride  would  not  consent  to  give  up  the  trip 
because  the  groom  had  always  been  a  little  shy, 
and  she  was  afraid  that  if  she  let  him  go  this 
time  she  might  not  be  able  to  land  him  again. 
So  the  parson  went  on  with  the  ceremony,  and 
the  groom  made  most  of  his  responses  in  bad 
language,  and  howled  for  help  when  he  wasn't 
swearing.  When  the  ceremony  was  over  the 
aeronaut  managed  to  land  the  balloon  without 
seriously  damaging  the  bridegroom,  but  when, 
a  year  or  two  afterward,  the  bride  wanted  to 


A   MATRIMONIAL,   ROMANCE.  127 

get  her  divorce,  the  court  held  that  there  had 
never  been  any  marriage,  for  the  reason  that 
both  the  groom  and  the  bride  had  not  appeared 
together  in  the  presence  of  the  officiating  minis- 
ter, and  that,  furthermore,  there  was  no  pro- 
vision in  the  law  which  would  permit  a  man  to 
be  married  upside  down. 

"  But  to  get  back  to  Josiah  Wilson.  He  lived 
in  Indiana,  close  to  the  boundary  line  between 
that  State  and  Illinois,  and  he  courted  Melinda 
Smith,  a  young  woman  who  lived  a  little  way 
up  the  mountain-side  with  her  father  and  three 
brothers.  The  girl  was  anxious  to  be  married, 
but  her  family  were  dead  against  it.  You  see, 
Josiah  was  a  Republican  and  a  Methodist,  while 
the  Smiths  were  Democrats  and  Baptists,  and, 
naturally,  they  hated  each  other  like  poison ;  and 
one  night  as  old  man  Smith  and  Josiah  met  on 
their  way  to  rival  prayer-meetings  they  ex- 
changed revolver- shots,  without,  however,  doing 
any  harm.  Then,  once  Josiah  had  most  of  the 
calf  of  his  leg  taken  off  by  the  Smiths'  bull-dog, 
and  twice  the  Smith  boys  came  into  the  sitting- 
room  where  Josiah  was  calling  on  Melinda,  and 


128  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

suggested  to  him  with  their  shot-guns  that  he 
had  better  go  home.  Gradually  Josiah  and 
Melinda  came  to  the  conclusion  that  her  family 
were  resolved  to  discourage  the  match,  so  they 
determined  to  elope  and  be  married  without  the 
knowledge  or  consent  of  anybody. 

"  One  dark  night  Josiah  carried  a  ladder  and 
planted  it  under  Melinda's  window.  He  had 
advised  her  to  walk  out  of  the  front  door,  which 
was  always  left  unlocked  at  night,  but  she  re- 
fused, saying  that  if  she  was  going  to  elope  she 
should  do  it  in  the  proper  way,  and  that  if 
Josiah  had  no  respect  for  her  she  had  some  lit- 
tle respect  for  herself.  She  climbed  down  the 
ladder  with  a  good  deal  of  difficulty,  because 
she  insisted  that  Josiah  should  help  her,  and 
also  that  he  should  stand  forty  jrards  away,  for 
reasons  connected  with  her  ankles,  and  he  found 
it  rather  trying  to  follow  out  these  contradic- 
tory orders.  However,  Melinda  reached  the 
ground  at  last,  and  the  pair  started  in  a  carriage 
that  had  been  waiting  just  around  a  bend  in  the 
road,  in  company  with  the  Methodist  minister. 
Their  plan  was  to  drive  to  the  next  town  and 


A   MATRIMONIAL  ROMANCE.  129 

there  to  be  married,  but  it  happened  that  one  of 
the  Smith  boys,  being  restless,  got  up  in  the 
night,  and,  looking  out  of  the" window,  saw  the 
ladder  standing  at  Melinda's  window.  In  about 
twenty  minutes  after  the  young  people  had 
started,  the  whole  Smith  family  and  their  shot- 
guns were  following  the  runaways  in  a  wagon 
and  gaining  on  them  fast. 

"  The  Methodist  minister,  whose  hearing  was 
unusually  good,  heard  the  sound  of  hoofs  before 
Josiah  noticed  it,  and  told  the  young  people  that 
there  was  not  the  least  doubt  that  they  were 
pursued,  and  would  be  overtaken  in  a  very  few 
minutes.  'And  then,  you  know,'  he  added, 
'the  chances  are  that,  being  Baptists,  they  will 
shoot  first  and  ask  for  explanations  afterward. 
The  only  thing  for  us  to  do  is  to  get  the  mar- . 
riage  ceremony  over  before  they  come  up. 
Then  they  will  see  that  opposition  is  of  no  use 
and  will  listen  to  reason.' 

"  Josiah  and  Melinda  at  once  consented,  and 
the  parson,  noticing  a  little  clearing  in  the 
woods  on  the  left-hand  side  of  the  road  and  a 
flat  sort  of  tombstone  standing  in  the  middle  of 


130  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

it,  said  that  he  would  stand  on  that  stone  and 
marry  his  young  friends  so  quick  that  it  would 
make  their  hair  curl.  He  was  particularly  glad 
to  meet  with  a  handy  tombstone,  for  he  said 
that  a  tombstone  was  the  next  thing  to  a  church, 
and  that  to  be  married  by  the  side  of  a  tomb 
would  be  almost  as  solemn  as  to  be  married  in 
a  minister's  study.  So  the  party  hastily  de- 
scended, the  parson  mounted  the  stone,  Josiah 
and  Melinda  joined  hands  in  front  of  him,  and 
they  were  married  and  the  parson  had  kissed 
the  bride  and  pocketed  his  fee  just  as  the 
Smiths'  wagon  drove  up  and  the  Smith  boys 
cocked  their  guns  and  covered  the  party.  But 
the  parson  was  wide  awake.  He  had  his 
revolver  out  and  old  man  Smith  covered 
before  anybody  had  taken  aim  at  him,  but 
instead  of  shooting  he  remarked  that  he  was 
a  minister  of  the  blessed  gospel  of  peace,  that 
there  was  no  necessity  for  bloodshed,  and  that 
he  would  blow  a  hole  through  old  Smith  unless 
the  Smith  boys  lowered  their  weapons  and  con- 
sented to  argue  the  matter.  'The  fact  is,  Colo- 
nel Smith,'  said  the  parson,  'you're  too  late, 


A   MATRIMONIAL   ROMANCE. 


131 


The  young  people  are  legally  married,  and  the 
sooner  you  accept  the  situation  the  better.     I 


"'YOU'LL  COME  STRAIGHT  HOME  •WITH  ME.'" 

married  them  not  two  minutes  ago,  standing  on 
that  identical  tombstone. ' 

"  Colonel  Smith  was  a  lawyer,  and  the  sharp- 


132  TOLD   BY  THE   COLONEL. 

est  one  in  that  part  of  the  country.  He  saw  the 
force  of  the  minister's  remarks,  so  he  told  the 
boys  to  put  up  their  guns  and  he  shook  hands 
with  the  minister.  Then  he  inquired,  in  a  care- 
less sort  of  way,  where  Josiah  and  Melinda  had 
stood  while  they  were  being  married.  The  par- 
son showed  the  footprints  of  the  bride  and 
groom,  and  then  Colonel  Smith  turned  to 
Melinda  and  said,  'You'll  come  straight  home 
with  me.  There  hasn't  been  any  marriage  yet. 
That  stone  is  the  boundary  mark  between 
Indiana  and  Illinois,  and  you  were  standing  in 
Indiana  and  that  other  idiot  was  standing  in 
Illinois  when  the  parson  tried  to  marry  you. 
Nobody  can  marry  in  two  States  at  the  same 
time,  and  I  shan't  recognize  the  pretended  mar- 
riage till  a  court  of  law  compels  me  to  do  so, 
which  will  be  never.  I  hope  this  will  teach 
you  the  folly  of  fooling  with  Methodism. 
When  you  want  to  get  married  next  time  try  a 
Baptist  minister,  who  will  know  the  difference 
between  a  tombstone  and  a  boundary  mark.' 
There  were  too  many  Smiths  and  they  were  too 
well  armed  to  be  reasoned  with  successfully,  so 


A   MATRIMONIAL  ROMANCE.  133 

the  upshot  was  that  Melinda  went  home  with 
her  family  and  Josiah  and  the  parson  went  to 
see  a  lawyer. 

"The  next  day  Josiah  brought  a  suit  for 
divorce  against  Melinda.  It  was  a  friendly 
suit,  you  understand,  and  his  only  object  was 
to  test  the  question  of  the  validity  of  his  mar- 
riage, for,  of  course,  no  man  can  get  a  divorce 
unless  he  first  proves  that  he  is  married.  Old 
man  Smith  conducted  the  case  on  his  side,  and 
a  lawyer  named  Starkweather,  who  is  now  a 
member  of  the  Illinois  Legislature,  appeared  for 
Josiah  Wilson.  Colonel  Smith  argued  that 
while  the  parson  who  conducted  the  alleged 
marriage  ceremony  could  undoubtedly  have 
married  a  couple  in  the  State  of  Indiana,  he 
could  not  marry  a  woman  in  Indiana  to  a  man 
in  Illinois,  for  the  reason  that  the  man  and  the 
woman  could  not  be  in  the  same  place  while 
they  were  in  two  different  commonwealths,  and 
that  hence  Josiah  and  Melinda  had  not  legally 
appeared  together  before  the  officiating  minister. 
Furthermore,  he  argued  that  the  minister  at  the 
time  of  the  pretended  marriage  was  standing 


134  TOLD  BY  THE  COLONEL. 

neither  in  Indiana  nor  in  Illinois,  but  on  the 
boundary  line;  that  the  statute  defined  the 
boundary  line  as  'an  imaginary  line'  running 
from  such  and  such  a  point  to  such  and  such  a 
point,  and  that  a  minister  who  stands  in  a 
purely  imaginary  locality  stands  virtually  no- 
where, and  hence  cannot  perform  any  function 
of  his  calling. 

"  On  the  other  hand,  Josiah's  lawyer  claimed 
that  the  minister  had  married  Melinda  Smith  in 
the  State  of  Indiana;  that  consequently  she 
must  have  been  married  to  somebody,  and  that 
that  somebody  was  unquestionably  Josiah  Wil- 
son. As  to  the  point  that  the  minister  stood  in 
an  imaginary  locality  because,  as  was  alleged, 
he  stood  on  the  boundary  line,  the  lawyer  main- 
tained that  it  was  a  physical  impossibility  that 
a  minister  weighing  two  hundred  and  fifty 
pounds  could  stand  in  a  purely  imaginative 
place.  Moreover,  he  was  prepared  to  prove 
that  while  performing  the  ceremony  at  least 
one  of  the  minister's  feet  was  in  the  State  of 
Indiana,  which  was  sufficient  to  make  him 
legally  present  in  that  State. 


A   MATRIMONIAL   ROMANCE.  135 

"The  arguments  lasted  three  days,  and  the 
court  before  which  it  was  tried,  consisting  of 
three  judges,  took  all  the  third  day  to  deliver 
its  verdict.  It  decided  that  Melinda  Smith  was 
legally  married  to  some  person  unknown,  though 
not  to  Josiah  Wilson,  and  that  Josiah  Wilson 
was  also  married  to  some  unknown  woman, 
who  was  not  Melinda  Smith,  whoever  else  she 
might  be ;  that  no  marriage  between  the  plain- 
tiff and  the  defendant  had  ever  taken  place ;  and 
that  no  divorce  could  be  granted,  but  that  if 
either  of  them  married  any  one  else  he  or  she 
would  be  guilty  of  bigamy. 

"  The  Smiths,  with  the  exception  of  Melinda, 
were  delighted  with  the  decision,  for  it  made  it 
reasonably  certain  that  Josiah  could  never  be 
recognized  as  her  husband.  She  was  a  good 
deal  cast  down  about  it,  for,  like  every  other 
Indiana  girl,  she  -had  looked  forward  to  being 
married  and  divorced  as  the  natural  lot  of 
woman.  Now  it  appeared  that  she  was  married, 
but  in  such  an  unsatisfactory  way  that  she 
could  never  have  a  husband  and  never  be 
divorced  from  any  one.  As  for  Josiah,  he  was 


136  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

furious,  but  there  was  no  help  for  it ;  the  law 
was  against  him,  and,  as  a  law-abiding  man, 
he  was  obliged  to  respect  it,  especially  as.  he 
could  not  hope  to  kill  off  all  four  of  the  Smiths 
if  he  decided  to  make  a  family  feud  of  it;  he 
himself  having  no  family  whatever,  and  no  one 
to  help  him  to  keep  up  his  end  of  the  feud. 

"For  the  next  fifteen  years  Josiah  lived 
a  single  man  except  in  name,  and  Melinda 
mourned  her  hard  fate  and  kept  house  for  her 
father  and  brothers;  but  one  day  Josiah 's  law- 
yer, who  was  by  this  time  in  the  legislature, 
came  to  him  and  offered  to  have  his  marriage  to 
Melinda  made  legal  in  all  respects  for  five  hun- 
dred dollars.  The  lawyer  was  so  certain  that 
he  could  do  this  that  he  was  willing  to  wait  for 
his  pay  until  after  he  had  gained  a  verdict,  and 
Josiah,  after  a  little  bargaining  such  as  every 
self-respecting  man  would  have  made  in  his 
place,  consented  to  the  lawyer's  terms.  It 
seems  that  the  lawyer  had  accidentally  discov- 
ered that  there  had  been  a  mistake  in  the  survey 
of  part  of  the  boundary  line  between  Indiana 
and  Illinois,  and  at  the  very  place  where  Josiah 


A   MATRIMONIAL   ROMANCE.  137 

and  Melinda  were  married.  A  rectification  of 
this  mistake  would  move  the  line  ten  feet  west, 
and  so  place  the  spot  where  the  pair  stood  dur- 
ing their  wedding  entirely  within  the  State  of 
Indiana.  The  proper  steps  to  obtain  the  recti- 
fication of  the  boundary  were  taken,  and  it  was 
rectified.  Then  Melinda  in  her  turn  began  a 
suit  for  divorce  against  Josiah,  and  had  no 
difficulty  in  proving  the  marriage  and  in  obtain- 
ing a  decree.  Josiah  paid  the  lawyer  his  five 
hundred  dollars  and  was  overjoyed  at  being 
finally  able  to  call  his  Melinda  his  own.  But  he 
met  with  a  little  disappointment.  Now  that 
Melinda  had  obtained  her  divorce,  she  thought 
she  might  as  well  live  up  to  it  and  marry  a 
fresh  husband.  So  she  married  the  Methodist 
minister,  who  had  just  lost  his  third  wife,  and 
lived  happily  ever  afterward. 

"  It  was  just  after  this  that  Josiah,  being  per- 
haps made  a  little  reckless  by  his  disappoint- 
ment, became  -involved  in  the  affair  that  I  was 
going  to  tell  you  about  when  you  interrupted 
me  and  wanted  to  hear  about  his  marriage. 
Matrimony  is  a  mighty  curious  thing,  and  you 


138  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

can  never  tell  precisely  how  it  is  going  to  turn 
out.  That  is  one  reason  why  I  was  never  mar- 
ried but  once,  though  I  spent  ten  years  of  my 
life  in  Chicago,  and  had  friends  at  the  bar  who 
stood  ready  to  obtain  divorces  for  me  at  any 
moment  and  without  a  dollar  of  expense." 


HOSKINS'  PETS. 

"YES!"  said  the  Colonel  reflectively,  "I've 
been  almost  everywhere  in  my  time  except 
in  jail,  and  I've  been  in  a  great  deal  worse 
places  than  a  first-class  American  jail  with  all 
the  modern  improvements.  The  fact  is  that 
philanthropic  people  have  gone  so  far  in  im- 
proving the  condition  of  prisoners  that  most  of 
our  prisons  are  rather  better  than  most  of  our 
hotels.  At  any  rate,  they  are  less  expensive 
and  the  guests  are  treated  with  more  respect. 

"  I  never  could  understand  a  craze  that  some 
people  have  for  prisoners.  For  instance,  in 
New  York  and  Chicago  the  young  ladies  have 
a  society  for  giving  flowers  to  murderers. 
Whenever  a  man  is  convicted  of  murder  and 
sentenced  to  be  hanged,  the  girls  begin  to  heave 
flowers  into  his  cell  till  he  can't  turn  round 

without  upsetting  a  vase   of    roses  or    a  big 
139 


140 


TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 


basinful  of  pansies  and  getting  his  feet  wet.     I 
once  knew  a  murderer  who  told  me  that  if  any- 


"  HEAVE  FLOWERS  INTO  HIS  CELL." 


thing  could  reconcile  him  to  being  hung  it 
would  be  in  getting  rid  of  the  floral  tributes  that 


HOSKINS'    PETS.  141 

the  girls  lavished  on  him.  You  see,  he  was  one 
of  the  leading  murderers  in  that  section  of 
countr}r,  and  consequently  he  received  about  a 
cart-load  of  flowers  every  day. 

"  I  had  a  neighbor  when  I  lived  in  New 
Berlinopolisville  who  was  President  of  the 
Society  for  Ameliorating  the  Condition  of 
Prisoners,  and  he  was  the  craziest  man  on  the 
subject  that  I  ever  met.  His  name  was  Hos- 
kins — Colonel  Uriah  Hoskins.  He  was  the 
author  of  the  Hoskins  Bill  that  attracted  so 
much  attention  when  it  was  before  the  legis- 
lature, though  it  never  became  law.  The  bill 
provided  that  every  prisoner  should  have  a  sit- 
ting-room as  well  as  a  sleeping-room,  and  that 
it  should  be  furnished  with  a  piano,  a  banjo, 
a  library,  a  typewriter,  a  wine-cooler,  and  a 
whist-table;  that  the  prisoner  should  be  per- 
mitted to  hold  two  weekly  receptions,  to  which 
everybody  should  be  allowed  to  come,  and  that 
he  should  be  taught  any  branch  of  study  that 
he  might  care  to  take  up,  books  and  masters 
being,  of  course,  supplied  free.  Colonel  Hos- 
kins used  to  insist  that  the  only  thing  that  made 


142  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

a  man  go  wrong  was  the  lack  of  kindness,  and 
that  the  sure  way  to  reform  a  criminal  was  to 
treat  him  with  so  much  kindness  that  he  would 
grow  ashamed  of  being  wicked,  and  would  fall 
on  everybody's  neck  and  devote  the  rest  of  his 
life  to  weeping  tears  of  repentance  and  singing 
hymns  of  joy. 

"  While  Colonel  Hoskins  was  fond  of  all 
styles  of  criminals,  burglars  were  his  particular 
pets.  According  to  him,  a  burglar  was  more 
deserving  of  kindness  than  any  other  man. 
'How  would  you  like  it,'  he  used  to  say,  'if  you 
had  to  earn  your  living  by  breaking  into  houses 
in  the  middle  of  the  night,  instead  of  sleeping 
peacefully  in  your  bed?  Do  you  think  you 
would  be  full  of  good  thoughts  after  you  had 
been  bitten  by  the  watch-dog  and  fired  at 
by  the  man  of  the  house-,  and  earned  nothing 
by  your  labor  except  a  bad  cold  and  the  pros- 
pect of  hydrophobia?  There  is  nothing  more 
brutal  than  the  way  in  which  society  treats 
the  burglar;  and  so  long  as  society  refuses 
to  put  him  in  the  way  of  earning  an  easier 
and  less  dangerous  living,  he  cannot  be  blamed 


HOSKINS'    PETS.  143 

if  he  continues  to  practise  his  midnight  pro- 
fession. ' 

"  I  must  say  this  for  Colonel  Hoskins.  He 
did  not  confine  himself  to  talk,  like  many  other 
philanthropists,  but  was  always  trying  to  carry 
out  his  principles.  He  really  meant  what  he 
said  about  burglars,  and  there  isn't  the  least 
doubt  that  he  had  more  sympathy  for  them  than 
he  had  for  the  honest  men  of  his  acquaintance. 

"  When  people  asked  him  what  he  would  do  if 
he  woke  up  in  the  night  and  found  a  burglar  in 
his  house,  and  whether  or  not  he  would  shoot 
at  him,  he  said  that  he  would  as  soon  think  of 
shooting  at  his  own  wife,  and  that  he  would 
undertake  to  reform  that  burglar,  then  and  there, 
by  kindness  alone.  Once  somebody  said  to 
Hoskins  that  he  ought  really  to  let  the  burglars 
know  his  feelings  toward  them,  and  Hoskins 
said  that  he  would  do  it  without  delay. 

"That  same  day  he  drew  up  a  beautiful 
'Notice  to  Burglars,'  and  had  it  printed  in  big 
letters  and  framed  and  hung  up  in  the  dining- 
room  of  his  house.  It  read  in  this  way :  'Burg- 
lars are  respectfully  informed  that  the  silver- 


144  TOLD    BY    THE    COLONEL. 

ware  is  all  plated,  and  that  the  proprietor  of 
this  house  never  keeps  ready  money  on  hand. 
Cake  and  wine  will  be  found  in  the  dining-room 
closet,  and  burglars  are  cordially  invited  to  rest 
and  refresh  themselves.  Please  wipe  your  feet 
on  the  mat,  and  close  the  window  when  leaving 
the  house. ' 

"  Colonel  Hoskins  took  a  good  deal  of  pride  in 
that  notice.  He  showed  it  to  every  one  who 
called  at  the  house,  and  said  that  if  other  people 
would  follow  his  example  and  treat  burglars 
like  Christians  and  gentlemen,  there  would  soon 
be  an  end  of  burglary,  for  the  burglars  would  be 
so  touched  by  the  kindness  of  their  treatment 
that  they  would  abandon  the  business  and  be- 
come honored  members  of  society — insurance 
presidents,  or  bank  cashiers,  or  church  treas- 
urers. He  didn't  say  how  the  reformed  burg- 
lars were  to  find  employment  in  banks  and 
insurance  offices  and  such,  but  that  was  a  mat- 
ter of  detail,  and  he  always  preferred  to  devise 
large  and  noble  schemes,  and  leave  the  working 
details  of  them  to  other  men. 

"  One  morning  Colonel  Hoskins,  who  was  an 


HOSKINS'    PETS.  145 

early  riser,  went  down  to  the  dining-room  before 
breakfast,  and  was  surprised  to  find  that  he  had 
had  a  midnight  visit  from  burglars.  Two 
empty  wine-bottles  stood  on  the  table,  and  all 
the  cake  was  eaten,  which  showed  that  the 
burglars  had  accepted  the  invitation  to  refresh 
themselves.  But  they  did  not  seem  to  have 
accepted  it  in  quite  the  right  spirit.  All  Hos- 
kins'  spoons  and  forks  lay  in  a  heap  in  the  mid- 
dle of  the  floor,  and  every  one  was  twisted  or 
broken  so  as  to  be  good  for  nothing.  The  win- 
dow had  been  left  open  and  the  rain  had  ruined 
the  curtains,  and  on  a  dirty  piece  of  paper  the 
burglars  had  scrawled  with  a  lead-pencil  the 
opinion  that  'Old  Hoskins  is  the  biggest  fule 
and  the  gol-darndest  skinflint  in  the  country. 
You  set  out  whiskey  next  time,  or  we'll  serve 
you  out. ' 

*'  Hoskins  was  not  in  the  least  cast  down  by 
the  rudeness  of  the  burglars.  'Poor  fellows,' 
he  said,  'they  have  been  so  used  to  bad  treat- 
ment that  they  don't  altogether  appreciate  kind- 
ness at  first.  But  they  will  learn.'  So  he  laid 

in  some  new  spoons  and  forks  and  added  a  bot- 
10 


146  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

tie  of  whiskey  to  the  wine  that  he  kept  in  the 
closet  for  the  burglars,  and  was  as  confident  as 
ever  that  the  next  gang  that  might  break  into 
his  house  would  be  melted  into  tears  and  repent- 
ance and  would  call  him  their  best  and  dearest 
friend. 

"A  week  or  two  later  Mrs.  Hoskins  was 
awakened  by  a  noise  in  the  dining-room,  and 
after  waking  up  her  husband  told  him  that 
there  were  burglars  in  the  house,  and  that  he 
must  get  out  of  the  back  window  and  go  for  the 
police.  He  told  her  that  he  was  sorry  to  see 
her  manifest  such  an  unchristian  spirit,  and 
he  would  show  her  how  burglars  ought  to  be 
treated.  There  was  not  the  least  doubt  that 
there  were  burglars  in  the  house,  and  they  were 
making  a  good  deal  more  noise  than  was  strictly 
consistent  with  the  prospect  of  rising  in  their 
profession,  for  no  able  burglar  ever  makes  any 
unnecessary  noise  while  engaged  in  business, 
unless,  of  course,  he  falls  over  a  coal-scuttle, 
and  then  he  naturally  uses  language.  St.  Paul 
himself  would  probably  say  something  pretty 
strong  in  similar  circumstances.  Hoskins  was 


HOSKINS'    PETS.  147 

sincerely  delighted  to  have  the  opportunity  to 
meet  his  burglarious  friends,  and  he  lost  no 
time  in  dressing  and  descending  to  the  dining- 
room. 

"He  wore  his  slippers,  and  the  burglars — 
there  were  two  of  them — did  not  hear  him  until 
he  was  fairly  in  the  dining  room.  They  were 
seated  at  the  table,  with  their  feet  on  the 
damask  table-cloth,  and  the  bottle  of  whiskey 
was  nearly  empty.  The  Colonel  was  much 
pleased  to  see  that  they  had  not  damaged  his 
silverware,  and  he  was  just  about  to  thank  them 
when  they  saw  him.  They  started  up,  and  one 
of  them  caught  him  by  the  throat,  while  the 
other  held  a  pistol  to  his  head  and  promised  to 
blow  out  his  brains  if  he  made  the  slightest 
noise.  Then  they  tied  him  hand  and  foot, 
gagged  him,  and  laid  him  on  the  floor,  and  then 
sat  down  to  finish  the  whiskey. 

"  Both  the  burglars  were  partly  drunk,  which 
accounted  for  the  unprofessional  noise  they  had 
been  making.  They  talked  in  rather  a  low 
tone,  but  Hoskins  could  hear  everything  they 
said,  and  it  was  not  particularly  encouraging 


148  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

to  a  gagged  and  bound  philanthropist.  They 
agreed  that  he  was  a  fool,  and  a  stingy  fool,  or 
else  he  would  have  kept  money  in  the  house, 
and  would  have  set  out  lemons  and  sugar  as 
well  as  plain  whiskey.  They  said  that  any 
man  who  treated  poor  working-men  in  that  way 
wasn't  fit  to  live,  and  that  Hoskins  would  have 
t )  be  killed,  even  if  it  was  not  necessary — as  it 
plainly  was  in  this  case — to  kill  him  in  order  to 
prevent  him  from  appearing  at  any  future  time 
as  a  witness  against  them.  They  admitted  that 
the  whiskey  was  not  bad  of  its  kind,  but  they 
were  of  the  opinion  that  Hoskins  had  left  it  in 
their  way  so  that  they  might  get  drunk  and  be 
caught  by  the  police. 

"  Colonel  Hoskins  listened  to  this  conversation 
with  horror,  and  the  prospect  that  the  drunken 
rascals  would  be  as  good  as  their  word,  and  kill 
him  before  they  left  the  house,  was  only  a  lit- 
tle more  painful  than  the  conviction  that  his 
method,  appealing  to  the  better  nature  of  burg- 
lars, had  failed  for  the  second  time.  When  the 
whiskey  was  exhausted  the  men  rose  up  and 
looked  at  Hoskins,  and  a  happy  thought  struck 


HOSKINS'   PETS.  149 

one  of  them.  'Thishyer  idiot,'  he  said,  'may 
not  have  any  money  in  the  house,  but  he's 
bound  to  have  some  in  the  bank,  and  he's  going 
to  write  us  a  check  for  a  thousand  dollars,  pro- 
vided we  let  him  off  and  don't  kick  his  brains 
out  this  time.'  The  other  burglar,  who  was 
in  that  benevolent  frame  of  mind  that  Irish 
whiskey  and  conscious  virtue  sometimes  pro- 
duce, agreed  to  the  suggestion,  and  Hoskins 
was  therefore  unbound  and  seated  at  the  table, 
and  told  to  draw  a  check  at  once  if  he  had  the 
least  regard  for  his  life.  As  he  was  gagged  he 
could  not  explain  to  the  burglars  the  kind  feel- 
ings that  he  still  had  toward  them,  and  the  fact 
that  they  could  not  draw  the  money  on  the 
check  without  being  captured  by  the  police. 
So  he  simply  signed  the  check,  and  groaned  to 
think  that  the  poor  burglars  were  so  slow  to  be 
reformed  in  the  way  that  he  had  hoped  they 
would  be. 

"  When  this  business  was  over,  the  burglars 
tied  Hoskins'  wrists  together  again  and  then 
tied  him  in  a  chair.  Then  they  set  to  work  to 
do  all  the  damage  they  could  do  without  making 


150 


TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 


too  much  noise.  They  tore  the  curtains  and 
hacked  the  piano  with  knives,  and  poured  a  jug 
of  golden  syrup  over  the  carpet.  Then  they 


"  TIED    HIM    IN    A    CHAIR." 


plastered  Colonel  Hoskins'  face  with  raspherry 
jam  and  emptied  a  sack  of  flour  over  his  head, 
and  went  away,  telling  him  that  if  he  ever 


HOSKINS'   PETS.  151 

again  ventured  to  trifle  with  the  feelings  of  poor 
but  self-respecting  men,  they  would  put  him  to 
death  by  slow  tortures. 

"Hoskins  sat  in  the  chair  for  a  couple  of 
hours,  till  his  wife  timidly  crept  downstairs  and 
released  him.  It  took  him  a  good  hour  to  get 
the  jam  and  the  flour  out  of  his  hair  and 
whiskers,  and  as  Mrs.  Hoskins  said  that  he  was 
in  no  state  to  enter  a  decent  bedroom  and  made 
him  wash  at  the  pump  in  the  back  yard,  he 
found  it  a  rather  cold  operation.  Perhaps  it 
was  the  remarks  that  Mrs.  Hoskins  addressed 
to  him  during  the  operation  that  irritated  him, 
for  she  intimated  very  plainly  that  he  was  no 
better  than  a  professional  idiot,  and  when  a 
man's  hair  is  stuck  together  with  jam,  remarks 
of  this  sort  from  the  wife  of  his  bosom  seem  to 
be  lacking  in  tenderness.  However  that  may 
be,  Colonel  Hoskins  had  no  sooner  got  himself 
into  what  his  wife  condescended  to  call  a  state 
of  comparative  decency,  than  he  took  down  his 
'Notice  to  Burglars  '  and  tore  it  into  a  thousand 
pieces.  That  day  he  had  an  electric  burglar- 
alarm  put  into  his  house,  he  bought  the 


152  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

savagest  dog  that  he  could  find,  and  he  stopped 
the  payment  of  the  check,  which,  however,  was 
never  presented.  He  continued  to  be  the  Presi- 
dent of  the  Society  for  Ameliorating  the  Con- 
dition of  Prisoners,  but  he  steadily  refused  to 
ameliorate  a  single  prisoner  convicted  of  burg- 
lary, and  while  he  was  always  a  lunatic  in 
regard  to  other  criminals,  he  openly  maintained 
that  a  burglar  was  the  worst  of  men  and  that 
kindness  was  utterly  thrown  away  upon  him. 
He  never  had  any  more  burglars  in  his  house, 
though  the  dog  now  and  then  lunched  off  warm 
leg  when  some  stranger  to  that  part  of  the  coun- 
try ventured  into  the  Hoskins  premises  at 
night.  Hoskins  was  very  fond  of  the  animal, 
which  was  quite  right,  but  his  practice  of  leav- 
ing a  bottle  of  whiskey,  with  an  ounce  of 
strychnine  in  it,  on  the  dining-room  table  every 
night,  in  case  a  burglar  should  succeed  in  get- 
ting into  the  house,  was,  in  my  opinion,  going 
a  little  too  far.  Antimonial  wine  would  have 
been  much  more  humane  and  sufficiently  effec- 
tive. But  there  is  no  man  who  is  more  severe 
than  a  philanthropist  who  has  been  turned  sour." 


THE  CAT'S  REVENGE. 

WE  had  been  discussing  the  Darwinian 
hypothesis,  and  the  Colonel  had  maintained  a 
profound  silence,  which  was  sufficient  evidence 
that  he  did  not  believe  in  the  development  of 
man  from  the  lower  animals.  Some  one,  how- 
ever, asked  him  plumply  his  opinion  of  Dar- 
winism, and  he  sententiously  replied,  "  Darned 
nonsense !" 

Feeling  that  this  view  of  the  matter  possibly 
merited  expansion,  the  Colonel  caused  his  chair 
to  assume  its  customary  oratorical  attitude  on 
its  two  rear  legs,  and  began  to  discourse. 

"There  are  some  things,"  he  remarked, 
"  which  do  look  as  if  there  might  be  a  grain  of 
truth  in  this  monkey  theory.  For  instance, 
when  I  was  in  France  I  was  pretty  nearly  con- 
vinced that  the  monkey  is  the  connecting  link 

between  man  and  the  Frenchmen,  but  after  all 
153 


154  TOLD   BY    THE   COLONEL. 

there  is  no  proof  of  it.  That's  what's  the  mat- 
ter with  Darwinism.  When  you  produce  a 
man  who  can  remember  that  his  grandfather 
was  a  monkey,  or  when  you  show  me  a  monkey 
that  can  produce  papers  to  prove  that  he  is  my 
second  cousin,  I'll  believe  all  Darwin  said  on 
the  subject ;  but  as  the  thing  stands  I've  nothing 
but  Darwin's  word  to  prove  that  men  and 
monkeys  are  near  relations.  So  far  as  I  can 
learn,  Darwin  didn't  know  as  much  about 
animals  as  a  man  ought  to  know  who  under- 
takes to  invent  a  theory  about  them.  He  never 
was  intimate  with  dogs  and  he  never  drove  an 
army  mule.  He  had  a  sort  of  bowing  acquaint- 
ance with  monkeys  and  a  few  other  animals  of 
no  particular  standing  in  the  community,  but 
he  couldn't  even  understand  a  single  animal 
language.  Now,  if  he  had  gone  to  work  and 
learned  to  read  and  write  and  speak  the  monkey 
language,  as  that  American  professor  that  you 
were  just  speaking  of  has  done,  he  might  have 
been  able  to  give  us  some  really  valuable  infor- 
mation. 

"Do  I  believe  that  animals  talk?     I  don't 


THE   CAT'S   REVENGE.  155 

simply  believe  it,  I  know  it.  When  I  was  a 
young  man  I  had  a  good  deal  to  do  with 
animals,  and  I  learned  to  understand  the  cat 
language  just  as  well  as  I  understood  English. 
It's  an  easy  language  when  once  you  get  the 
hang  of  it,  and  from  what  I  hear  of  German 
the  two  are  considerably  alike.  You  look  as  if 
you  didn't  altogether  believe  me,  though  why 
you  should  doubt  that  a  man  can  learn  cat 
language  when  the  world  is  full  of  men  that 
pretend  to  have  learned  German,  and  nobody 
calls  their  word  in  question,  I  don't  precisely 
see. 

"  Of  course,  I  don't  pretend  to  understand  all 
the  cat  dialects.  For  example,  I  don't  know 
a  word  of  the  Angora  dialect  and  can  only 
understand  a  sentence  here  and  there  of  the 
tortoise-shell  dialect;  but  so  far  as  good,  pure 
standard  cat  language  goes,  it's  as  plain  as 
print  to  me  to-day,  though  I  haven't  paid  any 
attention  to  it  for  forty  years.  I  don't  want 
you  to  understand  that  I  ever  spoke  it.  I 
always  spoke  English  when  I  was  talking  with 
cats.  They  all  understand  English  as  well  as 


156  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

you  do.  They  pick  it  up  just  as  a  child  picks 
up  a  language  from  hearing  it  spoken. 

"  Forty  years  ago  I  was  a  young  man,  and, 
like  most  young  men,  I  fancied  that  I  was  in 
love  with  a  young  woman  of  our  town.  There 
isn't  the  least  doubt  in  my  mind  that  I  should 
have  married  her  if  I  had  not  known  the  cat 
language.  She  afterward  married  a  man  whom 
she  took  away  to  Africa  with  her  as  a  mission- 
ary. I  knew  him  well,  and  he  didn't  want  to 
go  to  Africa.  Said  he  had  no  call  to  be  a 
missionary,  and  that  all  he  wanted  was  to  live 
in  a  Christian  country  where  he  could  go  and 
talk  with  the  boys  in  the  bar-room  evenings. 
But  his  wife  carried  him  off,  and  it's  my  belief 
that  if  I  had  married  her  she  would  have  made 
me  turn  missionary,  or  pirate,  or  anything  else 
that  she  thought  best.  I  shall  never  cease  to  be 
grateful  to  Thomas  Aquinas  for  saving  me 
from  that  woman. 

"  This  was  the  way  of  it.  I  was  living  in  a 
little  cottage  that  belonged  to  my  uncle,  and 
that  he  let  me  have  rent  free  on  condition  that  I 
should  take  care  of  it  and  keep  the  grounds  in 


THE  CAT'S   REVENGE. 


157 


an  attractive  state  until  he  could  sell  it.     I  had 
an  old  negro  housekeeper  and  two  cats.     One  of 


"I  HAD  AN  OLD  NEGRO  HOUSEKEEPER  AND  TWO  CATS." 

them,  Martha  Washington  by  name,  was  young 
and  handsome,  and  about  as  bright  a  cat  as  I 


158  TOLD    BY   THE    COLONEL. 

ever  knew.  She  had  a  strong  sense  of  humor, 
too,  which  is  unusual  with  cats,  and  when 
something  amused  her  she  would  throw  back 
her  head  and  open  her  mouth  wide,  and  laugh 
a  silent  laugh  that  was  as  hearty  and  rollicking 
as  a  Meth;  dist  parson's  laugh  when  he  hears 
a  gray -haired  joke  at  a  negro  minstrel  show. 
Martha  was  perhaps  the  most  popular  cat  in  the 
town,  and  there  was  scarcely  a  minute  in  the 
day  when  there  wasn  't  some  one  of  her  admir- 
ers in  the  back  yard.  As  for  serenades,  she 
had  three  or  four  every  night  that  it  didn't 
rain.  There  was  a  quartette  club  formed  by 
four  first-class  feline  voices,  and  the  club  used 
to  give  Martha  and  me  two  or  three  hours  of 
music  three  times  a  week.  I  used  sometimes 
to  find  as  many  as  six  or  seven  old  boots  in  the 
back  yard  of  a  morning  that  had  been  contrib- 
uted by  enthusiastic  neighbors.  As  for  society, 
Martha  Washington  was  at  the  top  of  the  heap. 
There  wasn't  a  more  fashionable  cat  in  the 
whole  State  of  Ohio — I  was  living  in  Ohio  at 
the  time — and  in  spite  of  it  all  she  was  as 
simple  and  unaffected  in  her  ways  as  if  she 


THE  CAT'S  REVENGE.  159 

had  been  born  and  bred  in  a  Quaker  meeting- 
house. 

"  One  afternoon  Martha  was  giving  a  four- 
o'clock  milk  on  the  veranda  next  to  my  room. 
I  always  gave  her  permission  to  give  that  sort 
of  entertainment  whenever  she  wanted  to,  for 
the  gossip  of  her  friends  used  to  be  very  amus- 
ing to  me.  Among  the  guests  that  afternoon 
was  Susan's  Maltese  cat.  Susan  was  the  young 
lady  I  wanted  to  marry.  Now,  this  cat  had 
always  pretended  to  be  very  fond  of  me,  and 
Susan  often  said  that  her  cat  never  made  a  mis- 
take in  reading  character,  and  that  the  cat's 
approval  of  me  was  equivalent  to  a  first-class 
Sunday-school  certificate  of  moral  character.  I 
didn't  care  anything  about  the  cat  myself,  for 
somehow  I  didn't  place  any  confidence  in  her 
professions.  There  was  an  expression  about  her 
tail  which,  to  my  mind,  meant  that  she  was  in- 
sincere and  treacherous.  The  Maltese  cat  had 
finished  her  milk,  when  the  conversation  drifted 
around  to  the  various  mistresses  of  the  cats,  and 
presently  some  one  spoke  of  Susan.  Then  the 
Maltese  began  to  say  things  about  Susan  that 


160  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

made  my  blood  boil.  It  was  not  only  what  she 
said,  but  what  she  insinuated,  and  according  to 
her  Susan  was  one  of  the  meanest  and  most 
contemptible  women  in  the  whole  United  States. 
I  stood  it  as  long  as  I  could,  and  then  I  got  up 
and  said  to  Martha  Washington,  'I  think  your 
Maltese  friend  is  needed  at  her  home,  and  the 
sooner  she  goes  the  better  if  she  doesn't  want 
to  be  helped  home  with  a  club.'  That  was 
enough.  The  Maltese,  who  was  doing  up  her 
back  fur  when  I  spoke,  stopped,  looked  at  me 
as  if  she  could  tear  me  into  pieces,  and  then 
flounced  out  of  the  house  without  saying  a 
word.  I  understood  that  there  was  an  end  to 
her  pretence  of  friendship  for  me,  and  that 
henceforth  I  should  have  an  enemy  in  Susan's 
house  who  might,  perhaps,  be  able  to  do  me  a 
good  deal  of  harm. 

"The  next  time  I  called  to  see  Susan  the 
Maltese  was  in  the  room,  and  she  instantly  put 
up  her  back  and  tail  and  swore  at  me  as  if  I 
was  a  Chinaman  on  the  lookout  for  material  for 
a  stolen  dinner.  'What  can  be  the  matter  with 
poor  pussy?'  said  Susan.  'She  seems  to  be  so 


THE  CAT'S  REVENGE. 


161 


terribly  afraid  of  you  all  of  a  sudden.     I  hope 
it  doesn't  mean  that  you  have  been  doing  some- 


"  POOR   PUSSY'S  NERVES  ARE  THOROUGHLY  UPSET.   ' 

thing  that  she  doesn't  approve  of.'     I  didn't 

make  any  reply  to  this  insinuation,  except  to 
11 


162  TOLD   BY  THE   COLONEL. 

say  that  the  cat  might  perhaps  be  going  mad, 
but  this  didn't  help  me  any  with  Susan,  who 
was  really  angry  at  the  idea  that  her  cat  could 
be  capable  of  going  mad. 

"  The  same  sort  of  thing  happened  every  time 
I  went  to  the  house.  The  cat  was  always  in 
the  room,  and  always  expressed,  in  the  plainest 
way,  the  opinion  that  I  was  a  thief  and  a  mur- 
derer and  an  enemy  of  the  temperance  society. 
When  I  asked  her  what  she  meant  to  do,  she 
would  give  me  no  reply  except  a  fresh  oath  or 
other  bad  language.  Threats  had  no  effect  on 
her,  for  she  knew  that  I  could  not  touch  her  in 
Susan's  house,  and  she  didn't  intend  that  I 
should  catch  her  outside  of  the  house.  Nothing 
was  clearer  than  that  the  Maltese  was  bound  to 
make  a  quarrel  between  me  and  Susan,  in  re- 
venge for  what  I  had  said  at  Martha's  four- 
o'clock  milk. 

"Meanwhile  Susan  began  to  take  the  thing 
very  seriously,  and  hinted  that  the  cat's  op- 
position to  me  might  be  a  providential  warning 
against  me.  'I  never  knew  her  to  take  such  a 
prejudice  against  any  one  before,'  she  said, 


THE  CAT'S  REVENGE.  163 

'except  against  that  converted  Jew  who  after- 
ward turned  out  to  be  a  burglar,  and  nearly 
murdered  poor  dear  Mr.  Higby,  the  Baptist 
preacher,  the  night  he  broke  into  Mr.  Higby's 
house  and  stole  all  his  hams.'  Once  when  I 
did  manage  to  give  the  Maltese  a  surreptitious 
kick,  and  she  yelled  as  if  she  was  half -killed, 
Susan  said,  'I  am  really  afraid  I  shall  have  to 
ask  you  to  leave  us  now.  Poor  pussy's  nerves 
are  so  thoroughly  upset  that  I  must  devote  all 
my  energies  to  soothing  her.  I  do  hope  she  is 
mistaken  in  her  estimate  of  you.'  This  was 
not  very  encouraging,  and  I  saw  clearly  that  if 
the  Maltese  kept  up  her  opposition  the  chances 
that  Susan  would  marry  me  were  not  worth  a 
rush. 

"  Did  I  tell  you  that  I  had  a  large  gray  cat  by 
the  name  of  Thomas  Aquinas?  He  was  in  some 
respects  the  most  remarkable  cat  I  ever  met. 
Most  people  considered  him  rather  a  dull  person, 
but  among  cats  he  was  conceded  to  have  a  co- 
lossal mind.  Cats  would  come  from  miles  away 
to  ask  his  advice  about  things.  I  don't  mean 
such  trifling  matters  as  his  views  on  mice,- 


164  TOLD   BY   THE   COLONEL. 

catching — which,  by  the  way,  is  a  thing  that 
has  very  little  interest  for  most  cats — or  his 
opinion  of  the  best  way  in  which  to  get  a 
canary  bird  through  the  bars  of  a  cage.  They 
used  to  consult  him  on  matters  of  the  highest 
importance,  and  the  opinions  that  he  used  to 
give  would  have  laid  over  those  of  Benjamin 
Franklin  himself.  Why,  Martha  Washing- 
ton told  me  that  Thomas  Aquinas  knew  more 
about  bringing  up  kittens  than  the  oldest  and 
most  experienced  feline  matron  that  she  had 
ever  known.  As  for  common  sense,  Thomas 
Aquinas  was  just  a  solid  chunk  of  it,  as  you 
might  say,  and  I  get  into  the  habit  of  consult- 
ing him  whenever  I  wanted  a  good,  safe,  cau- 
tious opinion.  He  would  see  at  a  glance  where 
the  trouble  was,  and  would  give  me  advice  that 
no  lawyer  could  have  beaten,  no  matter  how 
big  a  fee  he  might  have  charged. 

"  Well,  I  went  home  from  Susan's  house,  and 
I  said  to  Thomas  Aquinas,  'Thomas ' — for  he 
was  one  of  those  cats  that  you  would  no  more 
have  called  'Tom'  than  you  would  call  Mr. 
Gladstone  'Bill'— 'Thomas,'  I  said,  'I  want 


THE   CAT'S   REVENGE.  165 

you  to  come  with  me  to  Miss  Susan's  and  tell 
that  Maltese  beast  that  if  she  doesn't  quit  her 
practice  of  swearing  at  me  whenever  I  come 
into  the  room  it  will  be  the  worse  for  her. ' 

"'That's  easy  enough,'  said  Thomas.  'I 
know  one  or  two  little  things  about  that  cat 
that  would  not  do  to  be  told,  and  she  knows  that 
I  know  them.  Never  you  fear  but  that  I  can 
shut  her  up  in  a  moment.  I  heard  that  she  was 
going  about  bragging  that  she  would  get  square 
with  you  for  something  you  said  to  her  one  day, 
but  I  didn't  feel  called  upon  to  interfere  without 
your  express  approval.' 

"  The  next  day  Thomas  and  I  strolled  over  to 
Susan's,  and,  as  luck  would  have  it,  we  were 
shown  into  her  reception-room  before  she  came 
downstairs.  The  Maltese  cat  was  in  the  room, 
and  began  her  usual  game  of  being  filled  with 
horror  at  the  sight  of  such  a  hardened  wretch 
as  myself.  Of  course,  Thomas  Aquinas  took 
it  up  at  once,  and  the  two  had  a  pretty  hot 
argument.  Now  Thomas,  in  spite  of  his  colos- 
sal mind,  was  a  quick-tempered  cat,  and  he  was 
remarkably  free-spoken  when  he  was  roused. 


166  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

One  word  led  to  another,  and  presently  the 
Maltese  flew  at  Thomas,  and  for  about  two 
minutes  that  room  was  so  thick  with  fur  that 
you  could  hardly  see  the  fight.  Of  course,  there 
could  have  been  only  one  end  to  the  affair. 
My  cat  weighed  twice  what  the  Maltese 
weighed,  and  after  a  few  rounds  he  had  her  by 
the  neck,  and  never  let  go  until  he  had  killed 
her.  I  was  just  saying  'Hooray!  Thomas!' 
when  Susan  came  into  the  room. 

"  I  pass  over  what  she  said.  Its  general  sense 
was  that  a  man  who  encouraged  dumb  animals 
to  fight,  and  who  brought  a  great  savage  brute 
into  her  house  to  kill  her  sweet  little  pussy  in 
her  own  parlor,  wasn't  fit  to  live.  She  would 
listen  to  no  explanations,  and  when  I  said  that 
Thomas  had  called  at  my  request  to  reason  with 
the  Maltese  about  her  unkind  conduct  toward 
me,  Susan  said  that  my  attempt  to  turn  an  in- 
famous outrage  into  a  stupid  joke  made  the 
matter  all  the  worse,  and  that  she  must  insist 
that  I  and  my  prize-fighting  beast  should  leave 
her  house  at  once  and  never  enter  it  again. 

"So  you  see  that  if  it  had  not  been  that  I 


THE   CAT'S   REVENGE.  1 167 

understood  what  the  Maltese  cat  said  at  Martha 
Washington's  milk  party,  I  should  probably 
never  have  quarrelled  with  either  Susan  or  her 
cat,  and  should  now  have  been  a  missionary  in 
Central  Africa,  if  I  hadn't  blown  my  brains 
out  or  taken  to  drink.  I  have  often  thought 
that  the  man  Susan  did  marry  might  have  been 
saved  if  he  had  known  the  cat  language  in  time 
and  had  made  the  acquaintance  of  the  Maltese." 

The  Colonel  paused,  and  presently  I  asked 
him  if  he  really  expected  us  to  believe  his  story. 

"  Why  not?"  he  replied.  "  It  isn't  any  stiffer 
than  Darwin's  yarn  about  our  being  descended 
from  monkeys.  You  believe  that  on  the  word 
of  a  man  you  never  saw,  and  I  expect  you  to 
believe  my  story  that  I  understand  the  cat  lan- 
guage on  my  unsupported  word.  Perhaps  the 
story  is  a  little  tough,  but  if  you  are  going  in 
for  science  you  shouldn't  let  your  credulity  be 
backed  down  by  any  story." 


SILVER-PLATED. 

THE  Etruria  was  nearing  New  York,  and 
the  prospect  of  the  inevitable  interview  with  the 
custom-house  officers  had  already  cast  a  gloom 
over  the  passengers.  For  the  most  part  they 
were  silent,  and  their  faces  wore  an  anxious  and 
solemn  expression.  The  Rev.  Mr.  Waterman, 
of  the  Eighth  Day  Baptist  Church,  who  had 
bought  largely  of  ready-made  clothing  in  Lon- 
don, even  suggested  that  it  might  be  well  to 
hold  a  prayer-meeting  in  the  saloon. 

A  group  of  half  a  dozen  men  were  sitting 
in  the  lee  of  one  of  the  deck-houses,  smoking 
silently,  when  one  of  the  number,  a  young  and 
sanguine  person,  suddenly  exclaimed : 

"  I  don't  believe  any  honest  man  ever  has  any 
trouble  with  the  custom-house.  It's  the  fellows 
who  want  to  defraud  the  Government  who  make 

all  the  complaints. " 

168 


SILVER-PLATED.  169 

"  What  you  say  may  be  patriotism  and  it 
may  be  ignorance " 

"  What's  the  difference?"  murmured  a  cyni- 
cal interrupter. 

"But,"  continued  the  speaker,  "it  isn't  true. 
I  never  tried  to  defraud  the  Government,  but 
for  all  that  I've  had  more  trouble  with  the  cus- 
tom-house than  if  I'd  been  an  honest  collector 
of  the  port  trying  not  to  mix  up  politics  with 
the  business  of  the  office." 

"  America  expects  every  man  to  pay  his  duty, 
Colonel,"  replied  the  sanguine  young  man,  with 
a  vague  reminiscence  of  Nelson.  "Tell  us 
about  your  trouble,  and  I  rather  think  you'll 
have  to  admit  that  it  was  because  you  didn't 
want  to  pay  duty  on  something." 

The  Colonel  was  generally  understood  by  the 
rest  of  the  passengers  to  be  a  sort  of  theatri- 
cal manager,  a  position  which  in  the  United 
States  entitles  a  man  to  the  relative  rank  of 
colonel  in  the  militia  and  commodore  in  the 
canal-boat  service.  He  had  on  several  oc- 
casions shown  a  knowledge  of  music  and  of 
professional  musicians  which  had  won  for  him 


170  TOLD   BY  THE  COLONEL,. 

some  respect  among  those  of  his  fellow-passen- 
gers who  did  not  know  the  difference  between  a 
hurdy-gurdy  and  a  hautboy,  and  were  therefore 
fond  of  posing  as  musical  critics.  He  was  a 
shrewd,  good-tempered  colonel,  and  the  bar- 
keeper said  that  he  was  the  most  elegant,  high- 
toned  gentleman  he  had  ever  crossed  with. 

"Electricity,  gentlemen,"  resumed  the  Colo- 
nel, "  is  the  biggest  thing  of  the  century,  but  it 
has  its  drawbacks.  Did  any  of  you  ever  hap- 
pen to  ride  on  that  electric  railroad  in  Berlin? 
Well,  I  have,  and  'most  anybody  who  goes  to 
Berlin  is  liable  to  ride  on  it.  It  taught  me, 
however,  that  a  man  ought  to  be  pretty  careful 
when  he  trusts  himself  in  an  electric  car. 

"  It  happened  in  this  way.  I  was  an  agent 
in  the  general  show  business,  and  was  collecting 
an  opera  company  for  a  friend  of  mine  who  was 
going  to  open  in  Chicago.  I  had  come  across  a 
first-class  tenor — found  him  in  a  country  church 
choir  in  Germany — and  was  bringing  him  home 
with  me  under  a  contract,  when  he  and  I  took 
that  ride  on  that  Berlin  electric  road.  He  was 
a  careless  sort  of  chap,  and  he  sat  down  in  a 


SILVER-PLATED.  171 

corner  of  the  car  where  the  electricity  had  been 
leaking  and  the  seat  was  pretty  wet." 

"  I  never  knew  before, "  remarked  the  young 
man,  "  that  electricity  could  make  a  seat  wet. " 

"Probably  not,"  retorted  the  Colonel.  "I 
should  judge  that  there  might  be  a  right  smart 
lot  of  things  that  you  mightn't  know.  Most  of 
these  gentlemen  here,  however,  have  probably 
heard  that  nowadays  electricity  is  put  up  for 
use  in  bottles  and  metallic  cans.  It  stands  to 
reason  that  anything  capable  of  being  put  into 
a  bottle  is  capable  of  leaking,  and  wetting  what- 
ever it  leaks  on.  If  there  is  anybody  here  who 
knows  more  about  bottles  than  I  do,  I'm  ready 
to  let  him  tell  this  story. 

"As  I  was  saying,  my  man  sat  down  in  a 
sort  of  pool  of  electric  fluid,  and  sat  there  for 
about  half  an  hour.  He  was  wearing  in  the 
fob-pocket  of  his  trousers  a  cheap  silver  watch. 
I  had  given  it  to  him  so  that  he  might  get  some 
exercise  and  prevent  himself  from  getting  too 
fat.  He  never  suspected  my  motive,  but  he 
tired  himself  all  out  winding  it  up  for  two  hours 
every  night.  Now  you  may  not  believe  it,  but 


172  TOLD    BY   THE   COLONEL. 

I  give  you  my  word  that  the  electricity  com- 
pletely dissolved  that  watch-case  and  deposited 
the  silver  around  the  man's  waist.  He  didn't 
find  it  out  till  night,  and  you  never  saw  a  man 
so  scared  as  when  he  found  that  there  was  a 
band  about  four  inches  wide  silver-plated  all 
round  his  waist.  The  doctor  told  him  that  the 
only  possible  way  of  getting  it  off  would  be  to 
dissolve  it  with  acid,  but  that  the  acid  would 
eat  clean  through  to  his  spine  and  injure  his 
voice.  So  my  tenor  had  to  let  bad  enough 
alone,  and  be  satisfied  with  another  ten-and- 
sixpenny  gymnasium  that  I  gave  him  to  mol- 
lify his  feelings. 

"  We  came  over  on  the  Arizona,  and  it  got 
around  during  the  passage  that  my  man  was 
silver-plated.  There  was  a  custom-house  spy 
on  board,  and  it  happened  that  after  the  tenor 
had  sworn  that  he  had  nothing  dutiable  with 
him,  the  inspector  ordered  him  to  strip  and  be 
personally  examined.  Of  course  when  this  was 
done  it  was  discovered  that  he  was  silver- 
plated,  and  he  was  held  for  duty  under  the 
general  heading  in  the  tariff  of  'all  other  arti- 


SILVER-PLATED.  173 

cles,  silver-plated,  or  in  whole,  and  not  else- 
where enumerated, '  and  taxed  fifty  per  cent  ad 
valorem  and  fined  two  hundred  and  fifty  dol- 
lars for  failing  to  declare  that  he  was  plated. 
He  couldn't  pay  and  I  wouldn't  pay,  and  so  he 
was  locked  up  in  a  bonded  warehouse,  and  I 
went  to  consult  my  lawyer. 

"  I  laid  all  the  facts  before  him,  and  told  him 
I  would  pay  him  handsomely  if  he  could  get  my 
man  out  of  the  custom-house  without  paying 
either  duty  or  fine.  Now,  the  lawyer  knew  the 
tariff  from  beginning  to  end,  and  if  any  man 
could  help  me  I  knew  he  could.  He  didn't 
promise  anything  at  first,  but  he  discussed 
the  question  by  and  large  and  in  all  its  bear- 
ings. 

"  'I'm  afraid,'  said  he,  'that  there  is  no  hope 
of  getting  your  friend  out  without  paying  duty, 
but  we  may  succeed  in  having  him  classified  so 
as  to  make  the  duty  very  low.  For  instance, 
you  say  the  man  is  a  professional  singer.  Now, 
we  might  have  him  classed  as  a  musical  instru- 
ment and  taxed  forty-five  per  cent  ad  valorem. 
By  the  bye,  what  did  you  agree  to  pay  him?' 


174         -         TOLD  BY  THE   COLONEL. 

"'I  agreed  to  pay  him,'  says  I,  'a  hundred 
dollars  per  week. ' 

" 'That's  bad,'  says  the  lawyer.  'A  hundred 
dollars  a  week  is  fifty-two  hundred  per  year, 
which  is  about  the  interest  at  six  per  cent  on 
eighty-seven  thousand  dollars.  You  wouldn't 
like  to  pay  forty-three  or  four  thousand  dollars 
duty  on  him. ' 

" 'I'd  see  him  sent  to  Congress  first!'  says  I. 

"'Very  well,'  says  the  lawyer.  'Then  per- 
haps we  could  classify  him  as  machinery  or 
parts  thereof.  But  you  wouldn't  save  much  in 
that  way.  You'd  have  to  pay  forty  per  cent 
ad  valorem,  and  very  likely  the  appraisers 
would  say  that  you  had  undervalued  the  man, 
and  would  value  him  at  double  what  your  con- 
tract seems  to  say  he  is  worth.  They're  bound 
to  protect  American  machinery  against  the 
pauper  labor  of  Europe  every  time.' 

" '  How  would  it  do  to  classify  him  as  old 
family  plate?'  said  I. 

" '  Worse  and  worse, '  said  the  lawyer.  '  He'd 
have  to  pay  sixty  per  cent,  and  you'd  have  a 
good  deal  of  difficulty  in  proving  that  he  is  old 


SILVER-PLATED.  175 

family  plate.  Of  course  it  could  be  done,  but  it 
would  probably  cost  you  more  than  the  whole 
amount  of  the  duty.  They're  a  perfectly  honest 
set  of  men,  the  appraisers,  and  they  naturally 
come  high. ' 

" '  What  will  I  do,  then?'  said  I;  'let  him  die 
in  the  custom-house  and  then  sue  for  damages?' 

" '  There  might'  be  something  worth  while 
done  in  that  way,'  says  the  lawyer,  'but  it 
would  be  middling  hard  on  the  man.  But  I'll 
tell  you  what  we  can  do.  Didn't  you  say  that 
the  man  was  singing  in  a  church  choir  when 
you  hired  him?' 

"'  I  did  so,'  says  I. 

" '  All  right, '  says  the  lawyer.  '  We'll  classify 
him  as  an  "  article  used  in  the  service  of  relig- 
ion," and  get  him  in  free  of  any  duty  whatever. 
You  go  and  get  him  an  engagement  in  a  church 
without  an  hour's  delay,  and  then  come  to  me. 
We'll  beat  the  custom-house  this  time,  sure 
enough. ' 

"  I  got  the  man  an  engagement  to  sing  for  a 
week  in  a  Methodist  meeting-house,  and  before 
the  week  was  out  he  was  decided  to  be  an 


176  TOLD    BY    THE    COLONEL. 

article  used  in  the  service  of  religion,  and  was 
returned  to  me  free  of  duty,  and  cursing  the 
head  off  of  every  officer  in  the  revenue  service. 
The  end  of  it  was  that  my  tenor  claimed  that 
I  had  broken  my  contract  by  setting  him  to  sing 
in  a  church,  and  he  sued  me  for  damages,  and 
got  them  too.  So  you  see,  my  young  friend, 
that  a  man  may  have  trouble  with  the  custom- 
house who  does  not  want  to  defraud  the  Govern- 
ment out  of  anything,  not  even  the  duty  on  that 
sealskin  sack  that  I  hear  you  have  taken  apart 
and  packed  in  a  spare  pair  of  boots." 


THE   END. 


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